she who strives
by lalaietha
Summary: "I once had a wife, princess. Sarah was her name." Or to put it another way, a woman named Sarah once had a husband.
1. Thaw

Everywhere has an edge. And on the edge of the forest so feared that it no longer has any name and is only called _dark_ by those who know that when the sun goes down the predators walk, there is a village and its farms.

Nothing grand, nothing special. Only a cluster of cottages and the fields that feed them, huddled together against the world. Anywhere something exists, there is an edge, and edges always bleed.

The dogs set up barking before Sarah even sees the man coming down the lane, the overgrown, leafless branches of the willows tugging at his coat and bag. That's what they're for and she doesn't mind the noise; it brings her out of the cottage and means she's watching when the man does come into view.

He's a soldier. She can see that in him at once. It's the bearing of his body, sure - and it's also the air that comes with him as it comes with all soldiers, as if they can't help but wear the charnel house stink of the battlefield wherever they go. Not everyone can taste that air as it follows a man, but Sarah can and here Sarah does.

And to be fair, it's also the stagger of drink in them, because it seems like they're the only ones who can afford anything but small beer. The publican might be generous with a cup or so, but not enough to make a man unsteady on his feet.

Without hurrying, she gets the axe from the wood-pile and lays it near to the side of herself on the bench; then she calls the dogs to hold by the gate and to shut up, so that by the time the stranger makes it to the rough fence about the cottage and cowshed, Grip and Bale have taken up their places between Sarah and the man and are growling to frighten a wolf.

He's tall, is the stranger. He carries an axe himself - though a fighting thing, his, and no farm's tool - and knives at his belt, a pack on his back and what might once have been a sergeant's marker at his collar. He's none too clean and doesn't look out of place for this part of the kingdom: hair that would be fair if it weren't filthy, skin browned only a little by sun and wind, a strong jaw. When he speaks, though, he sounds more as if he's from over mountain-way more, a long way from home.

With an irritable glance at the dogs, he hitches his pack back into place and says, "Call'em off, I'm not here for trouble."

"You'll forgive me if I wait to see what I think of that," Sarah says. She puts the basket she's been weaving beside her and says, "And I might think more of it quicker if you told me who you are and where you may be coming from. Even what you might be wanting."

The stranger has the same look all of them have - so many men, young and old. Once, all the young men of any village ran off as fast as they could to join the dukes and counts and their valiant armies; then long after that stopped, the queen's soldiers took every man or boy who looked as if he could walk more than a mile without falling over. Those as hid their sons or nephews and were found out suffered for it, and there's always someone in any village willing to carry tales to the queensmen for some coin or some other favour.

Or just because they don't see why anyone else should escape the loss they've been saddled with.

Sarah's hid as many as she can, each time the recruiters sweep through, teaching them how to lurk in the edges of the Dark Forest and neither die nor be caught. But this village suffers, same as they all do. The young men for the battlefield and now and then a young woman for some bastard's bed.

Often, Sarah wonders what the queen thinks she'll rule, if she kills her subjects all.

This stranger has that same haunted, flat look to his eyes behind the cloud of mead or whisky or wine; it's in his voice, too, when he says, "Looking for food and a place to sleep, willing to work for it. Publican says you've all three - bed, board, work."

Sarah glances at the dogs. They're growling still, but only because she hasn't called to them yet; there's nothing of their own fear or dislike in the sound of it. She whistles sharp and they relax; she calls "Grip, Bale, to me," and they come and settle at her feet. Their ears are pricked and they watch every move the stranger makes, but that's all.

"Depends," she says, and notes that even though the dogs are gone, he doesn't take that as his invitation, staying outside the gate and only leaning one hand on it. She jerks her chin at what's hers and says, "I've a woman, a man and a child; with that you can see I don't need help with the farm or the animals. I've better need of a man who can hunt, who can track and snare in a forest without leaving a wreck behind him or being frightened by shadows."

The stranger's eyes narrow, and he glances over Sarah's head towards the shadow of the woods beyond. "That forest?" he asks and Sarah nods

She watches him as he stares at that horizon, thoughts hidden behind the shadow already so at home in his eyes. Then he says, "I've hunted."

Sarah purses her lips and then asks, "And what would your last captain say of you t'me if I asked him?" and for the first time gets more from his face than his following ghosts.

It's a dark smile to be sure, but it's also the first time he looks at her in the eyes; and what he says is, "Nothing. I cut his throat after he nailed an old man to a door."

There's something about how he says it that makes her believe him, about both the act and the reason. It also says he's quick, to know that telling that tale here wouldn't cost him anything and might gain him much. Sarah lets her brows lift and says, "Is that why you're about here instead of getting yourself killed?" because as much as she may approve of that, she can't afford having the queensmen here looking for vengeance.

"No," he says. "Ravenna's leaving that fool duke in his castle to rot. The war's over. We've all been let go."

Another thing to calculate, that, Sarah thinks. Because she knows what the fields do to a man, and not all of them come back who they were, but they all come back with weapons and the knowing of their use, and many come back thinking the world owes them whatever they like. Another reason it might be good to have a man other than Jack about the place.

"I can only pay bed and board," she says. "That's all I get myself. We share, and I eat the same as the others and sleep just as they do. And I sleep with the child and other woman beside me and the dogs beside them; be told." At the word _dogs_ Grip and Bale tilt their pointed muzzles to her, knowing when they're being spoken of; they're massive things, looking more like wolves than dogs and of her uncle's breeding, and Bale with puppies coming soon enough to sell and so more fearsome than ever.

He finds this funny in the same way he found the question about his captain funny; he says, "They'll be bored damn dogs." And he hasn't gone away now that she's told him her terms. In the end, Sarah nods.

"Come in then," she says. "I'll show you where you can put what's yours and where you'll sleep. I go to the forest in a day or so, so you'll have some time to look about and settle in."

She gets up as he comes in the gate and then adds, "You'll have to go to the pub for your drink; I don't brew anything stronger than thick ale."

#

Little Rose always wakes them, each and every morning. The girl sleeps and rises with the sun as natural as anything, and the soldiers took their cockerel the last time they came through. As far as Sarah's concerned, it's no great loss.

When Rose wakes, the dogs wake and they're better than a cockerel; after them comes the grunts from May and the grumbles from Jack and then this morning something new - the curses from Eric.

That's the name he gave her; Sarah's by no means sure it's his real one, but she doesn't blame a man if he wants to start his life over now and doesn't question it. And his morning curses are milder than she might have expected, as is the way he shoves Grip's curious nose out of his face.

At the sound of his voice, May's up in a flash and out to the privy. There's nothing Sarah can do for her terror of a new man about; it'll be Eric's lookout to convince the silent woman he's not a threat, if he cares to. Otherwise, May'll just keep her brother between them. Jack's watching the man, waiting for him to step wrong, and Rose does as she always does with someone new: stares at him wide-eyed from under Sarah's arm.

"Go," she says to the child, "get, go and find the eggs, Rosie," and the girl darts out with the dogs yelping happily at her heels. When she's done in the privy May will scrub herself and then milk the cow and Jack's wandered out to see to feeding and watering and cutting wood and everything else as might be needed.

"Y'can help Jack, if you know how," Sarah says, unbraiding her hair to braid it up again and moving from the alcove where the shared bed nestles to the jug of water and basin beside the hearth and the bread-oven where she'll make today's food. And Eric does get up and goes, for all he has the look of the badly hung-over to him.

The day has the welcome dullness of familiar, productive toil. The sun that comes out is pale and wan, but it's sunshine all the same; after her duties with the hens, little Rose plays with her dolls of twig and straw by Sarah's feet while Sarah does the work of the day and May scrubs everything clean after her. Jack's as sour as ever he could be to the new man of the place, but Eric with his sore head doesn't seem to mind and Jack doesn't come to Sarah with concern after.

Sarah watches Eric through the hours of work and times of rest, and decides he'll do, as long as he doesn't come back in a temper from drink. And if he does, well, Jack can handle any man that drunk and there's enough other men in the village grateful enough for what Sarah brings back out of the forest to run off a stranger for her. They might not stand between her and the queensmen, but a stranger . . . that's another matter altogether.

He leaves his axe by the door but wears his knives as a matter of course; he hangs his money-belt on the axe, almost like a challenge. But Jack's more honest than a saint and neither May nor little Rose have any use for money; little Rose might not even remember what coins mean, she sees them so seldom. Eric moves about the farm like a man who knows what he's about, even if he's yet to learn the little quirks of this farm, in this place, at this time.

By the end of the day May still hides from him, but it might be that May always will.

Next morning wakes to a downpour, the kind to keep anyone with sense indoors. As the day of mending and make-work drags on, the newcomer's face grows more and more dour; that night, Sarah learns, she thinks, how he started on the road down into drink and its concomitant Hells.

His cries aren't loud, but his flailing is bad enough that Bale yips and whines at him, then barks loud enough that Sarah fears the household will wake and gets up to shush her. Rose sleeps on, and May; Sarah'd woken with the first noise from her new man, and Jack did the same - though once he sees Sarah awake and Bale calming, he stays abed and closes his eyes.

Eric stares at the thatch of the roof for a spell after Sarah shakes him awake by the shoulder, clearly working to bring his breath under his mastery. Sarah kneels on the packed earth of the floor, sleep-braid slithering over her shoulder and falling across the neck of her shift. It's chill outside the blankets and she wraps her arms around herself until Eric sits up; then she pulls away, startled by the movement.

"Sorry," Eric mutters, scrubbing at his face as if he could scrub away the dream. In this moment, there's something less guarded about him than there has been and Sarah knows how dangerous that can be.

"Everyone has bad dreams," Sarah says, waving that away. "You well enough t'sleep again?" She can't help but yawn. Eric glances at her and then waves her away.

"I'm well enough," he says. "Go back to sleep."

Sarah hesitates a moment, but in the end she pushes herself to her feet and curls back under her own quilts and woven blankets with May and Rose sleeping beside her.

She doesn't think Eric gets any more sleep at all.

The next morning, Eric asks her if she still means to go to the forest today. Sarah shakes her head.

"Ground can be treacherous enough dry," she says. "It'll still be soaked from yesterday's pour; I'll wait until tomorrow at least." The pale sun doesn't dry anything fast these days - even berries and fruits are better dried carefully in a bread oven.

"Forest doesn't need any _help_ t'try t'kill you," Jack mutters as if to himself. "It'll try hard enough by its lonesome."

"I've no fear of the forest," Sarah says, as she always does, and he grunts his disbelief as he always does. "But I've no mind to break my neck on mud-slick hills either. We'll go tomorrow."

Eric nods, and then splits everything in the wood-pile in half the time it would take Jack to do it. Then he leaves, stamping down the lane towards the village heart and pub with his axe at his hip and his money-belt on.

He's not back by sunset, or by the time Sarah blows out her one stub of candle and curls up to share the heat of the other two women and sleep. The dogs at the foot of her bed don't bark in the night and no sound wakes her, and so when Sarah opens her eyes the next morning she wonders if she'll see Eric again.

There's something in her that's surprised when she finds him sleeping up against her gate; then again, there's something in her that isn't, and thinks less of the surprised part, come to that. When she leans down to shake his shoulder, he wakes with a start and a snort and a waving arm that almost knocks her over; she steps back and tilts her head at him.

There's a flicker of a thought she can't read that passes over his face before it closes into the surly anger of a man who drank too much last night and has no drink to ease the morning after, looking forward only to hard work. "I didn't want to be attacked by the God-damned dogs," he says, abruptly. He uses the gate to pull himself to his feet, a little worse for wear. "Are we going, then?"

Sarah just nods. "D'you need anything from inside?" she asks, for courtesy sake; Eric shakes his head.

"Show me this dread forest of yours, woman," he says. "I'm sure I've seen worse."

#

Sarah leaves the dogs for Jack and May. When Bale's had her pups it may well be that Sarah will take some of them in tow to the forest along with their mother, as part of their training, but not yet. She wraps her cloak around her tight and uses a length of soft old rope to tie it at her waist, with her small pack strapped across her shoulders. From beside the gate she takes up her stick to walk with and sets out.

Eric's a dour and sullen walking companion, but he's no worse than solitude and Sarah simply decides not to bother saying much. The sun's brighter than it was yesterday but it's early still and the dawn chill nowhere near gone. Some of the late nightjars and early daybirds are flitting here and there amongst the clumps of brush and grass; every now and then there's the rustling sound of some small creature fleeing before the sound of human feet.

"Y'don't trap here?" Eric asks at last, breaking the silence as they make their way up the roll of a hill that'll bring them in sight of the forest. Sarah shakes her head.

"No point," she says, "and poorer than I am scrape for the last edible creatures here. Even the rabbits are perishing few."

"Y'can die, eating only rabbit," Eric says, and Sarah turns to give him a thin smile.

"I know," she says. "I've seen it happen."

They crest the hill and Sarah pauses to lean on her stick, knowing that the sight will stop the man she's with, because it always does. And does this time, too, bringing his halt halfway through a step as if he met a fence she can't see. Sarah watches his face take in what lies before them for a moment, and then glances over it herself.

They say it used to be called the Tree-Guard, or something else even further back in years. Some of the tales say it used to be green and growing all the way to the edge, though never any more welcoming, not really. Just the difference between a healthy dog growling at you and one that's skin and bones and spectral eyes: you wouldn't want to cross either. But whether it was once or no, these days it's black and clawing and at the edges looks dead, although the trees stand year after year and put out thin, diseased-looking leaves that drink the sun and then fall and die.

"That's a forest," Eric says, disbelief in every echo. "Looks like a bloody bonfire nobody's set a torch to yet."

Sarah smiled the same thin smile. "Yes," she says. "The queen sent men to burn it once. Some of the villagers even helped them, because nobody really likes the forest."

In the pause meant to draw out the question, to draw him out, Eric asks, "What happened to them, then?" in a tone, Sarah thinks, meant to tell her he knows her trick of silence and doesn't like it - but can't quite resist the wish to know.

"We don't know," she says, calmly, "but their horses weren't too badly torn about and the meat was good - it fed the village for a while."

"And now you're the only one brave enough to go near it," Eric says, shrewd, returning a prod for her draw. She shrugs.

"I'm the one who knows what needs knowing not to be afraid of it," she says.

"Y'don't tell anyone else," he returns and she shakes her head.

"The first thing is to keep a reverence and an awe for the forest itself," she says, "and there aren't many these days who are good at that. Besides," she adds, starting forward again, "if too many people know it, the Forest might change its ways."

"The way y'say that makes it sound as if it thinks," Eric points out, a little more interest and a little less sullen in his tone. Sarah glances at him.

"I've never seen anything t'make me think otherwise," she replies. Then she glances at the axe at his belt and says, "Don't cut any living tree in this wood, Eric. Not even if it means freezing to death. Most places, there's plenty fallen wood and dead lichen to make fire from, but have a watch to make sure it doesn't spread. The Forest doesn't give any benefit of doubt, and it holds grudges a very long time."

They walk for a while in silence. The air changes, the closer they get to the trees. It grows stiller and thicker, wet and dusty at the same time, as if you opened an old attic full of dust while it poured rain outside. As they pass a few ravaged trucks and creaking branches, the sun starts to seem more dim, more distant, and she catches Eric looking up towards the sky, face growing drawn.

He breaks the silence again, to ask, "You trap here."

"Yes," she says, "and gather some things. Hunt, when I can, though I'm no great huntress."

"In a forest where y'don't dare cut a bough for a fire?" he demands, and Sarah has to stop herself from laughing. The wood pulls in around her, too, familiar and frightening at once. Sometimes she thinks it draws at her thoughts, makes her something else while she's here; she has to remember that he doesn't know, doesn't even know the stories every child in these parts grows up knowing.

"There's much more to fear from the trees here than anything that bears flesh," she tells him, looking over her shoulder to watch his face. "The trees and their scions, creeping plants and poisonous ones. My grandfather said they were put here to guard something, and every other living thing is only food to them."

"Like a dead fish planted at the roots," Eric says. He's trying to sound unconcerned, but the forest bothers him - but then, the forest bothers everyone. She smiles.

"Yes," she says. "What do they care if I take a deer? I leave them offal and blood, it feeds them well enough. I gather some plants here, too, but never more than can be spared."

"If it's such a force as y'say," Eric demands, following her as she ducks beneath one vast branch in the midst of her path, "why hasn't it taken the dead fields? The abandoned ones? I've never met a forest wouldn't take any open space back to itself, given half a chance."

Sarah shakes her head, glancing ahead and paying care to see whether something had shifted her trail. She'd lied, a little: the trees are the thing to fear most, of course, but there are other things that lived under the trees' shadows, and many of them like the mischief of changing paths and leading men and women astray. Most of them are weak - no bears here, no wolves - but that didn't matter if they led you into a bog and drowned you. Then you would be so much meat to them. She'll tell him about them later, when she's surer of him. If she is.

"It never has," she says absently. "Not even in the days of the old king, or even before that when my grandfather said it was green - it never grows beyond the boundaries it sets, and trying to cut tree and root out stump to turn the forest into fields - "

"Ends with your body feeding tree-roots," Eric finishes and when she looks at him this time there's something closed in his face she can't make sense of. She nods.

"Yes," she says. Then, when he pauses but says nothing, she goes on, "Come, I'll show you how to tell if the water is safe to drink."

They don't go far in; Sarah doesn't intend to stay the night. She checks the nearest traps and snares and watches to see that her would-be huntsman didn't lie at her gate. In the end she's satisfied enough by that, and if he's quiet and winces at the light when they get glimmers through branches, he's not poor company and seems to remember what she tells him.

She's not lying when she says she doesn't fear the forest, but still: on the return, when she hears the dogs barking and sees the square of firelight where Jack's opened the door in answer, she's glad of it.

Eric's feet take him to the village again; when he comes back he smells of cheap ale, but he's neither too late nor loud and only snores a little when he wraps himself up in his blankets and falls asleep.

Sarah's dreams are mostly of her grandfather, but that's to be expected.

#

The new rhythm of days and nights comes quickly, as it always does. That's the nature of the world, Sarah often thinks. Men and women learn to make things familiar and ordinary as fast as they can, because the strange and disordered is so unpleasant.

So frightening.

The weather clears, a little. Spring leans toward summer, though there's little enough difference. Sarah's neighbours make hopeful sounds about being able to get a harvest in without any of it rotting or being blown to garbage by the windstorms or rain. Jack ventures no opinion. Sarah has long believed he thinks God listens, or perhaps that some devil in particular does, and turns his hopes against him if he's ever fool enough to voice them. Maybe it's true. Too early to tell, at any rate. Hopeful springs have led to empty bellies come autumn before now.

They plough by hand, because horses cost too much to feed and to keep. There are times it's almost too much to feed and keep a cow, or to pay Berd's stud fee to keep her useful, but a cow at least turns about and feeds the household through the winter. You can't get food off a horse if you still want it to work.

And so for all that Sarah said to him she needed no extra help with the farm itself, she can't deny Eric's presence makes this part easier. And that's work he can do drunk or sober or any unpleasant state in between. Unlike hunting.

The first time Eric doesn't bother to stop drinking or to sleep over the night, Sarah finds him leaning against the cottage wall with Grip's head in his lap and a mead-skin in his hand. When he goes to get up, she shakes her head, pressing her lips together. She's told him most of what she knows, by now, and she'd almost thought he think on it, wouldn't be this stupid.

"I'll not take a man into the forest without his wits about him," she says, flat. "You drink, you stay here and I'm better without you."

And in the forest that day her grandfather's form flickers at the corner of her eyes, for all she knows enough to ignore it. When she comes home Eric's not there and she's glad not to see him.

Little Rose grows with the corn and the grass, and favours May, her mother, like a reflection through a mirror of years. Sarah shows May how to patch clothes together for the child, and that much May does with a willing hand. She leaves it to Jack or Sarah to give them over, though, and looks straight ahead with her hands clenched in her lap when Rose hugs her.

Sarah can never tell if the little girl notices, or whether it's something that's beyond her understanding, that she'll only understand when she's a woman and can look back and comprehend what she remembers. Rose seems happy enough, at least. Wondering at anything else might be borrowing trouble.

One of the days that she goes into the village with the things she's brought out of the forest to sell rather than to use, she trades a headache cure for a band of bright red ribbon. It's long enough to wind into Rose's hair in a braid, and that's what she does, to Rose's delight. The girl hugs Sarah and goes to show off to her uncle, who summons up a smile for her and a pat on the cheek while he sharpens the axe. She shows off to Eric, who's sober and cheerful enough to tell her she looks pretty.

May smiles a thin smile and then gets up; Sarah knows the cowshed is where the younger woman hides, but she doesn't interfere. There's only so much May can take, sometimes, before her mind turns a violent enemy and overwhelms her for days. If a bit of hiding is what needs to keep her from that then, Sarah thinks, let her hide.

Jack takes Rose to help him repair the fence. Sarah sits on her own front stoop, shelling the peas she's managed to harvest off sad-looking vines.

She's not surprised at the question when Eric asks it, almost surprised it's taken him so long; still, she sighs when he asks, "Who's the father?"

There's many as would lie; Sarah knows that. She knows there's some in the village as thinks she should do, or at least find a sweeter way to tell the truth, because everyone is someone's son or brother here. But she never will, and without looking up she replies, "My late husband." She splits open a pod. "He meant to make certain it was my fault we had no children, not his."

When Eric asks, "'Late'. Was that what brought his end, then?" she looks up sharply, but can't read his face. It's this moment, she knows, that he might well say something she'll throw him off her farm for, even if there's no sense to that at all. Some things still leave their sores around her heart, and this is one.

But she can't read what she sees in the man sitting on one of her crude stools, and he doesn't say any more, so after the silence she says, "No. Queen's wars did that. My grandfather threw him out, so he went for a soldier when some of the other men were dragged off. Thom, with the wooden leg, brought back news when he died at Torval."

When she opens this pod, the peas scatter and she has to lean over to gather them up and try not to gather too much dirt with them. She makes herself open the next with a little less force, but it's hard.

"Is that why she doesn't talk?" Eric asks, and Sarah looks up again, and still sees the same thing she can't read. Or maybe, if she's honest with herself, she can but doesn't want to - not wanting to understand, to take in anyone else's thoughts or pain, when these are fresh in her mind.

"Worse," she says, crisply. She focuses on her work. "She came here that way, she and Jack. He says the queensmen did it. That man chose her because she didn't talk, so who could she tell?" She snaps open this pod, but does it over the bowl. "As if I needed words to tell me," she adds, and then wishes she hadn't. With some effort she brings her voice back to normal, finishes with, "Little Rose was born nine months later. We could coax May to nurse her. Grandfather lived long enough to see her walking. She's happy and she has warm clothes, a place to sleep and food. Many children these days have less."

"I didn't say anything," Eric says in a voice so mild it's almost its own protest, its own cast defense.

"I know," Sarah says, and then stands up. The peas aren't done, not quite, but she doesn't want to sit here anymore. "When we're closer to midsummer," she says, to change the subject, "we'll stay in the forest through the night."

"Shortest nights y'can ask for," Eric observes, and Sarah smiles thinly.

"I told y'that the first trick of surviving the Forest is to respect it," she says, and goes into the cottage.


	2. Spring

A week later, one of her neighbour's sons comes home. They're happy for a day, for three, and then less: the young man will do things when asked, but otherwise sits and stares at the fire or over the fields like he's lost in his own mind, and his mother says he cries when he sleeps.

She comes to Sarah's cottage in the evening to ask for help, and Sarah has to hide the sigh. She feeds the woman stew and bread and has her sit on the benches around the rough table, where Jack's already left, May is finishing and Eric sits at the other end, watching in silence while Rose plays with her dolls in front of the fire.

"I don't know if I can help," Sarah says, quietly, and the boy's mother reaches for her hand.

"You did with Walter's girl," she says, with the kind of hope Sarah almost hates, because it so often turns sour. "I remember, you brought back - "

"I'll look, Isabel," Sarah says, because she's never been good at holding firm against any kind of hope at all. "I will. But I can't promise - you have to understand I can't promise. I might not find what I need, and even if I do, it might not work. Swear to me you understand that."

She doesn't, of course. They never do, because they can't; when Sarah shows the woman out, she leans her forehead against the door-frame and sighs.

#

"How far in d'y'intend to go?" Eric asks her, as they set out the next morning, both of them carrying more than they normally would. She shakes her head.

"No way to tell," she says. "Things move around, the forest changes. But some of the things I mean to get can only be gathered at dusk or dawn, at least if your wish is to live to use them. And if you're in the forest at night, it's always more dangerous to move about than to stay put."

He nods. "Sense. Plan t'stay, know y'won't get caught wandering in the dark before you reach the edge." He gestures in a way that might not even be mocking for her to go first along the path, to lead them on.

Even though she knows better - knows that a few iron edges and the strength of arms won't make a bit of bloody difference if the forest turns against her - there's a certain comfort in bringing Eric with her, and his axe and his knives and his time as a soldier. Something built into a woman's mind, she thinks. Maybe. Or maybe just hers.

"Did your husband ever go into the forest with you?" Eric asks, and Sarah thinks she might take those thoughts back, if he's going to come about with questions like that.

"I didn't go into the forest when I was married," she says, making the answer oblique. Then she speeds up her steps a little, like she can walk away from the thoughts.

Eric keeps up with her. It's no surprise, with the length of his legs, but he's in a questioning mood today - just when she wishes he weren't. Maybe it's to turn his own mind from feeling ill; he stopped drinking about the time last night that Isabel came to plead with Sarah, and it's been enough time he may just feel sick.

"What did you do for Walter's girl?" he asks. For a moment, Sarah tries to think if Eric would even know who Walter is, or his daughter - but no, Walter died of an infected wound last winter, and his daughter married and left.

Sarah shakes her head again. "Nothing I should have," she says. She glances at him and knows that won't be enough, at least not without turning the mood sour, and sighs. "There are things I can find in the forest that make . . . make your mind different. Sometimes it can shake off melancholy, the kind that kills you. If I mix them right, and if you're lucky."

"You don't know what makes someone lucky," Eric guesses.

"No," she agrees shortly. "When it doesn't work I don't know why, and when it does I don't know why, and when it does strange things instead I don't know why. I wouldn't give it to May, and I only gave in to old Walter because he was . . . " she trails off, not knowing how to put into words what she'd seen in him that night. How desperate he'd been, and how strange and gone his daughter was. "She was dying, anyway. It couldn't make things worse." She shifts her pack and says, "The things I'd need are hard to find. I may not be able to get all of them."

When she glances at Eric, his face tells her that he heard the rest, what she didn't say. That even if she can, she may pretend she couldn't.

Sarah keeps them walking for three hours before she chooses where they'll camp. It's not that much further than they've gone before, but she still watches Eric look sharply around, as if memorizing the place.

"Some of the lines and snares I've shown you aren't far from here," she says, and he nods as he puts his pack down.

"I've noticed that," he says. Then he adds, "This place might almost be livable, with enough sun."

"You might as well check them," Sarah tells him, not bothering to answer his comment. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, crouching down to open her pack and find the little leather bags she'll need and the cloth to cover her face. "Bring back anything in them, and then find dead wood for the fire. You'll want to have it lit before the twilight."

"Is it a good idea, t'have all the catch back in camp?" Eric asks, frowning. Sarah stands up, tying the bags to the rope around her waist. She smiles at him, a little wryly.

"I've told you," she says. "There's nothing big enough in here to attack us. If we have everything now, we won't have to stay or wander come tomorrow - and come tomorrow, I think you'll want to be as far from here as y'can get." She pushes her hood back. "I know I did, the first time my grandfather brought me. Light the fire before twilight," she repeats. Eric scowls at the trees for a beat and then glances at her.

"And you?" he demands, sounding a little uncertain, perhaps a touch concerned. Sarah gives half a laugh.

"Of the two of us in this forest," she says, "I'm by far the safer."

Her grandfather called them _puffs_, which she's always thought is too kindly a name for little balls of black madness and terror. Sarah can find them nearly anywhere, but for this she needs to find them either very young or very old, and she ties the cloth across her nose and mouth while she looks, just in case.

There are things to fear in the Dark Forest, but it almost doesn't need them. The little puffs are enough. They put the fear in your head, drive every terror into your mind until your body gives up and throws you down to wait for the end that so often comes, as worn out as a rabbit fleeing a fox. Sarah's never seen it, but her grandfather used to say he had, and he said it'd been a terrible thing to watch.

Sarah can believe it. Fear can be like a disease, sometimes. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but killing you all the same, rotting your mind and twisting your body. May's mind is too full of fear, fear she can't get out even when she's safe - though Sarah will admit that maybe May has the right of it. Maybe nowhere is safe, and most men and women just fool themselves better.

Either way, she's gotten a breath of puff-spore laden air before and doesn't want it again. The cloth over mouth and nose isn't perfect, but it means that first spurt won't get her and then she can hold her breath until she's well-away.

If she can find one that's very old or very young, she can take it without harm; one puff will hold more than enough spores for her needs. Almost too much more. She'll have to stir salt in with the rest and bury it a ways away from the farm, and take care with it until she can. Once Grip got a nose full of the stuff and she very nearly needed to take the axe to him.

That's the simple part of the mix, if the more dangerous. You can find it anytime if you know the way. As to the other, well. She'll have to see.

#

It takes Sarah longer than she expects to find a patch with either old or young bulbs; by the time she does, Eric's finished with his tasks and come to find her.

She's sitting by the edge, waiting for the things to forget she can move, to think she's just part of the skeletal trees, thickets and vines around them. The cloth's still over her face and one of the little leather bags is empty and open in her hand, although she's gathered a few other things - flowers, leaves and roots, some insects and creeping things, a feather or two - in the others as her day took her through the wood.

Eric's timing is poor, but that's the nature of the forest: if it can catch you at the wrong moment, it will, and this time it does. Sarah's just reached out her hand to take one of the bulbs when she hears the sound of a footfall followed by the sound of her name. She's not expecting it; the startle catches her, and instead of just snatching back one bulb along, she loses her balance, pulls it free as she falls and hits three or four others with her hand.

The patch sprays its spores into the air like a kind of demonic fog.

Sarah throws herself back. She scrabbles for the leather pouch, trying not to breathe, and gets rid of the puff. Then she scrambles to her feet and pushes Eric back from the gently spreading mess of spores as he waves his hand in front of his face.

"What in - " he starts, but she shakes her head, still not breathing, and pulls at his hand to tug him away. Not until they've stumbled several yards does she let him go and pull the cloth from around her mouth, shoving it into one of the pockets of her skirts.

She's got some of it in her, she knows. She can tell by the flickering of shadow-shapes at the edge of her vision and the sound of crying. She ignores them, though, and ties the leather bag shut, ties that to her waist and then looks at Eric.

He's blinking like he's drunk and staring around. She starts to say, "Eric," but then he manages to see something that isn't there and suddenly it's not her hand on his arm, it's his on hers yanking her behind him.

"We have to leave," he's saying, low and urgent. "We have to go, now, they're - "

"Eric," she tries, but he doesn't hear her. "_Eric._"

"No, better you, you go for the edge of the forest, I'll do what I can but you'll have to run," he goes on, and he's stepping backwards, pushing her and hand going to his axe. "You'll - "

"_Eric!_" she snaps, and then when he doesn't hear her she says, "_Sergeant!_" and grabs a hand-full of his hair to make him look at her, because if his mind's there maybe the title will catch him when the name that may not even truly be his doesn't.

And it does, so that he's like a dog jerking back from a sting, staring at her. "There's nothing there! No," she interrupts, putting a hand over his mouth - there may be spores on it, but by now it really doesn't matter - and repeating, "_There's nothing there!_ I know this forest, I know its ways and I promise you, whatever you're seeing isn't real and it isn't there. _Trust me_. You have to trust me."

He still has his axe in his hand, and he looks around, eyes wide and lost. "But - " he says and she shakes her head again, letting him go.

"I know you can see them, though I bet they're not where they were," she says. "I'd lay good money and a day's food that they've moved about and changed and now you're seeing things on the ground that weren't there a moment ago - Eric, I _know_. It's, it's the things I was gathering." She reaches out and touches his shoulder as he stares at things she can't see and then jumps at a sound she can't hear. "You got a breath-full of them. I got a little, but I know what they are and I know when not to look - I promise you, Eric, there's nothing there. There's nothing in this forest except the forest. It doesn't need anything else. Trust me. Please, please trust me."

Eric stares around again and for a moment her own shadows are driven out by the fear that he won't listen, or that he can't. Then he shudders, looking down and pressing finger and thumb into his eyes. "How can I make it stop?" he asks, each word careful.

Sarah squeezes his shoulder. She doesn't want to know what he sees, but she can guess. For some it's nightmares and stories and things they imagine in the dark; but she'll wager for those who come back from the queen's wars, memory has better and stronger fears.

"Just time," she says. "I'm sorry, I didn't think you'd come looking for me - the puffs don't usually grow where I set you to find the lines. Besides, I think I told you about things in - "

"Y'did," he says, cutting her off. "Let's - can we go back to the camp now? I don't - d'y'need anything else out here?"

There's a little admiration that sparks in her, because it sounds as if he's not willing to go back without her and that he's willing to stay here if she needs. She shakes her head. "No," she says. "I've got what I came for and more besides. Anything else is up to luck, tonight or tomorrow."

She lets him make the fire, and there's a little more admiration she finds as he does: though she sees him startle and recoil once or twice from whatever it is the forest makes him see, he doesn't cry out and once the moment of revulsion is past he gets about what he's been doing. Taking her at her word that it isn't real.

Sarah stores the things she found today away in their bags, wrapping the puff-bag in more layers of leather and wrapping it close with string. He's dressed the rabbits and birds from the traps, as she told him to, leaving the offal and blood where he found them for the forest. She digs her little tin pot out of her bag and the camomile out as well, setting it on the fire he makes and throwing the dried blossoms on the water.

Eric's sitting now with his legs folded, putting an edge on his axe. Sarah tilts her head at him and says, gently, "The forest finds our points of weakness. The places where our fear is. It'll make you run till you break your neck, or until you die of fear and exhaustion, or run into a bog. If you'd gotten more of that stuff in the face I might have had to leave you, at least for a while - follow you at a distance and bring you back when you'd calmed down. It's not your fault. You're doing well to stand it now."

Eric scrapes the stone down the edge of the blade a few more times, his jaw working and no words coming. Then he demands, "What do you see?"

Sarah shrugs and prods at the fire with a stick to break open some coals and boil the infusion faster. "It's different," she says. "I know to hold my breath, so it's not so bad." And that's a coward's answer and unfair to a man doing so well at holding his own fear back so she sighs and says, "Sometimes it's monsters or evil spirits or something else; sometimes it's my grandfather in pain, or little Rose bleeding and screaming and running, or something else." She takes a deep breath and says, "Sometimes it's the soldiers who killed my father, or my mother in Hell for killing herself. Or horrible things I've imagined and prayed never come true. Grandfather said if y'breathe in enough of it, it doesn't matter whether or not you know what's there isn't real - you can't stop from believing it, and that's what kills you."

"Soldiers?" Eric asks, and this time she thinks she understands what's in his face and shakes her head.

"This part of the kingdom fought when Ravenna killed the king," she says. "It fell quick enough, and her men made examples in most of the villages hereabouts. My father was one of them, and then my mother couldn't live without him." She shrugs. "Was soon enough after that May and Jack came to us. Most other people turned them out; they thought May was witch-touched or something like. Grandfather knew better. Anyone who's been out to this forest knows better." She stabs at the flames this time and then gets ahold of herself, reminding herself that you can't stab away memories.

"I thought you said it wasn't so bad, once upon a time," Eric asks, puzzled, and Sarah laughs.

"Well, maybe. Once a long time ago. It's been turning t'this for longer than my grandfather was alive. He's the one who used to tell me these things. Just before he died, he said he wondered if it felt Ravenna coming. They say she's taken other kingdoms before us. They say she's lived many lifetimes and sucked so many kingdoms dry."

A branch breaks and a shower of sparks fly up; Sarah watches them, as the light starts to turn towards dusk. "What do you see?" she asks, and it's not thoughtless but it's not kind.

Eric's jaw tightens again, and she watches his face as he stares down at the axe. "She can pull the dead out of their graves," he says, toneless. "They're not alive, not really, but the bodies rise and fight again, and they don't stop till you've cut them to pieces." He, too, stares at the fire then and says, "First I fought them. Then I fought beside them. Then I couldn't anymore."

The thought should make Sarah shudder, but it doesn't; it just makes her sad, sad and angry to know that the queen isn't happy to let people rest even when they've already died for her. Though if the priests are right, and Sarah hopes they are, the important part, the soul, is long gone to reward.

She refuses to believe in any God that wouldn't welcome the war-lost dead with the open arms of a father.

"I can promise you," she says, letting her voice turn a little wry, "that there are no walking dead in this forest."

Eric looks up at her sharply, and then laughs an ugly laugh. "No," he says, "I s'pose not - your trees would never let that kind of thing up out of the ground where it wouldn't fertilize them anymore, would they?"

Sarah says, "They're not really my trees."

#

Twilight falls in the way of twilights in the forest, sudden and grey and foreboding. Sarah takes out the candle-ends she brought so they're easier to hand, just in case either of them feels the need of the light. Of the four, now five of them at the farm, she's the only one who bothers to stay awake and work at anything that needs more than firelight after the sun goes to bed. More than one of the wealthier homes in town, including the tavern, give her their ends in exchange for one thing or another.

They've been sitting in silence for some time. Sarah's camomile's boiled long-since and now she scoops the flowers out with darting movements and pours half of it into the other cup she brought, handing it to Eric. He makes a face at it.

"Not the drink I want," he says, but he takes it anyway.

"The other would only make it worse," she says. "I told you I'll not take a drink-addled man into this forest."

"Y'seem as if you're speaking from experience," Eric notes and Sarah's smile in answer has no humour.

"I do. Drink killed my grandfather, but I made him stop coming here long before it did." She cants her head at Eric, a question in it this time. "Have you ever watched someone die of drink?" she asks, and he looks down at his feet and doesn't answer. "If you think what you're seeing here and now is bad," she says, "wait till then. And here it'll wear off after you sleep," she adds, "but not then."

Eric says nothing for a while, and neither does she. They roast one of the rabbits over the coals and after he drinks the camomile Eric seems calmer. In the end he says, "Get some rest. I'll watch; I'll not sleep yet no matter what I do."

"If you like," Sarah says, and wraps herself up in her cloak and lies close to the fire, using her pack as a pillow. "Wake me when you're tired."

When he wakes her, that isn't why. She can taste approaching dawn in the air when his hand on her shoulder shakes her awake, and feel the stiffness of a whole night's sleep in her body. But she doesn't stop to think much about that, because his low voice saying, "Sarah," is urgent in her ear.

She thinks it's only the second time he's used her name, the first being just before the spores caught them; maybe that's why it startles her awake.

Eric's crouching next to her and his axe is in his hand again. It doesn't take much to see what's unnerved him when Sarah sits up and looks around; he stands up, still tense and ready.

The lights that flicker and dance and dart show up in the pre-dawn darkness; the wings of the moths attracted to them flutter against their glow and against the firelight. They smell like a butcher's refuse pile, and Eric says so, though his words are harsher.

"That's the moths," Sarah says absently, crouching back down to rummage in her pack again for the clay jar and its stopper. "Don't worry. They can't hurt us unless we follow them."

"The moths?" Eric says, looking at her strangely.

"The lights," she says. "The moths are scavengers in this wood. So are the butterflies. They don't drink from flowers, they drink from the water that comes off the rotting dead, so they stink. Then the lights eat the moths by night, and the butterflies by day. This is what I wanted." She glances at the axe and says, "Put that away. It wouldn't help anyway and I don't want you taking off my arm just because you're startled."

Reluctantly, Eric returns the axe to its place at his belt. "What are the lights?" he demands, watching them warily, jerking away when one gets too close.

"I don't know," Sarah says. She pushes sleep-wisps of hair out of her eyes and watches the horizon for the dawn-glow. "If you try to catch them now, they just disappear; I've never seen them in the sunlight, although a group of butterflies will take wing sometimes for no reason you can see. If you catch them just at dawn or dusk they look like a kind of fly themselves and then they die.

Eric frowns at her, she can just see it in the dark. "They eat the moths?" he asks, and she nods towards them.

"Watch. Don't worry, they don't hurt us."

Eric watches, and so does Sarah, as a moth darts too close; for an instant the light shows it up, fragile and painted and then - the moth touches the light and it brightens and then there's nothing but a falling husk, drained of all colour, wings gone, body brittle.

"Sometimes I think the little lights eat souls," Sarah says, matter of fact. "People and even animals are too big for them, but the moths and the butterflies . . . "

"Hnh." Eric says. In the dim light that's now beginning on the horizon, he looks troubled. "Ever thought what would happen if you got a swarm of the damn things?"

"Yes," Sarah says, and shrugs again. "They don't swarm. They don't eat together. Or whatever it is they do."

"Someday they might," Eric points out.

"Someday I might die of a fever," Sarah counters, "or be killed by soldiers passing through, or die when I fall and break my neck. Someday anything might happen. For now, it never has, and I've no reason to think it will."

When there's just enough glow from the sky that Sarah could see to tie a knot if she needed to, she manages to catch one of the lights in her jar. She pushes the stopper in as tight as she can and shakes her head when Eric asks to see.

"Later," she says. "When I've got it home, and it's dead, and I know it won't fly away."

Catching the thing doesn't make her feel any better about, well, anything. She doesn't know how her grandfather learned to do this, and she doesn't trust the potion when she makes it, and she doesn't think this is wise at all - but every time she thinks of just opening either jar or little leather bag and letting them drop where whatever lives in this wood will trample them into the mud, she sees Isabel's pleading face.

"I shouldn't do this," Sarah says. She says it mostly to herself, but she says it aloud and Eric gives her a thoughtful look.

"Maybe it's worth the chance."

She shakes her head but doesn't disagree, as he scatters the ashes and gathers up the things, feathered and furred, that he pulled out of the traps.

It's hard to tell what's worth the chance until afterwards. She'll have to wait on that.

#

When they reach the farm again, May's hiding in the shed and won't come out, and Jack's mood is dark and sour. Little Rose comes running out to see Sarah and Eric, throwing her arms around Sarah's neck to be picked up. The dogs come out to lick their faces.

Sarah leaves May as she is and sets Rose to sifting flour; Jack gets on with his work, and Sarah sends Eric to the tavern to bring her wine to mix her medicine in. It'll take three days to make it, and she'll call on Isabel then.

"Why she sad?" Rose asks. She doesn't talk a lot, the sweet thing, so Sarah startles and turns to look at her. "Mama," she clarifies. "She sad. Why she so sad?"

Sarah puts down the bag and jar she's taken out and looks at the child, trying to think how to explain, this rare time that little Rose speaks. Eventually, she crouches down so that her head is level with Rose's and says, "Sometimes bad things are like a sickness that doesn't go away," she says. "It's like that for your mama."

Rose frowns and asks, "Like in her soul?" and Sarah looks startled.

"Who's been talking to you about souls?" she asks, frowning, and Rose shrugs.

"Friar Watt, sometimes," she says. "Sometimes Eric. I ask him questions. He tell me things."

"I didn't know that," Sarah says, and smoothes the girl's hair. "Yes, my love, a little like in her soul. It makes her scared sometimes. She can't tell the difference between dreaming things and real things and the dreams are all bad."

"Oh," says Rose, and goes back to her sifting.

When Eric comes back it's with only the wine Sarah asked for. She notes that, but doesn't say anything. It's up to him what he does and doesn't do; she's got no claim on him but that you can ask for in return for a place to sleep and food to eat.

She does show him the transparent, fragile body in the jar, like a cross between a bee and a dragon-fly. He shakes his head at the ways of the forest, which is all one really can do.

"Y'cook that up in wine, with the other stuff, and - ?" he asks. Rose smiles and waves at him. He smiles back, absently.

"The sick man drinks it and he'll sleep for a while," she says. "He might wake up better. He might wake up the same. He might wake up from terrible dreams. That's all I know. Grandfather would say his grandfather learned it from dwarves, but I never knew whether to believe it."

"Never met a dwarf in these parts," Eric says.

"Nor have I." Sarah crushes the pod and the body both and pours the wine over the powder, then sets it aside. Then she puts a hand on Rose's shoulder and points to the bowl. "Don't touch," she says, firm as she can. "It's very bad for you. Don't touch at all."

"It'll make monsters come and eat your head," Eric adds, which gets him wide-eyes from Rose and a sidelong look from Sarah - but in a way she supposes it's true, and it might work best after all.

Rose nods solemnly, eyes still wide. "Won't touch," she adds, as extra reassurance. Sarah kisses the top of her head.

"Good girl," she says. "Now let's have that flour."

She makes pastry to wrap around the rabbit they eat for their main meal, along with some of the peas and early carrots. And though there's not that much work to be done after eating, Eric stays at the farm instead of going into the village and the tavern and drink.

As May pours the water into the big pot to warm, so that Sarah could scrub the dishes, Sarah smiles to herself.

The sun's setting when the boy comes to the farm, out of breath from running flat out and pale under the dirt on his face. His name is Rolph and he's the tavern-keeper's boy; he's often sent on errands or as messenger by the whole village, in exchange for a bite to eat or a sip to drink or, Sarah would admit, in exchange for not getting smacked across the ear when it came to some of the villagers.

Today he looks unwontedly serious, and Sarah's gut clenches as she goes to the open door to meet him. He takes his cap off as he comes to her and swallows.

"Missus Sarah," he says and swallows again. "I'm come from Missus Isabel's brother, like."

"What for?" Sarah asks softly, though she thinks she can guess.

"He says he thanks y'for his sister and all," Rolph says with his face grave and fiddling with his cap in both hands, "but there'll be no need of any potion for his nephew, being as we found him in the millpond just now."

He chews on his lip as Sarah finds the news strikes her as it always does: far away and strange and calm in the moment. "I see," she says, and she hears Jack swear softly behind her. May pays no mind, for once happy to brush Rose's hair, and Sarah wouldn't change that for a man May's never met.

Eric's face is blank and grave.

"We think he must've slipped and fell in," Rolph offers. "Being as he wasn't much for paying 'ttention where we walked, these days."

"Of course," Sarah says. "They'll bury him tomorrow I guess, then," she adds and Rolph nods. "Well, my thanks for coming. Run along now, boy, get on home before dark."

She leaves May fussing with Rose and Jack to do whatever he's about and says, "I'll just see to the cow," to explain why she's going out. She's not surprised when Eric follows her, but she can't say she's happy either.

The chickens fuss restlessly as she passes them, and the cow looks up - smells her unhappiness, maybe. Sarah pretends not to notice that Eric's standing in the shed door until he speaks and makes that impossible.

"Y'know he didn't slip," he says, quiet and sure. Sarah pauses in the act of pouring water into the cow's trough. She swallows so that her voice will be steady when she answers.

"Don't dare say that to anyone else," is what she replies, turning to look him full in the face in the light of the day that's starting to dim. "Don't dare."

"I don't mean to," he says. "But y'know he didn't slip."

Sarah pours the water, hearing it splash against old wood. "Of course I do," she says, soft and bitter. "So does his mother, at the root. But it'll do her nor anyone else any good to have to admit that. As far as it matters, he slipped and he fell, Eric." She folds her arms around herself and says, "It's true in its own way, too. Just the treacherous ground was in his head, not in front of his feet."

Eric steps back from the door when she moves towards it. "I hadn't thought of it that way before," he says as she slips past him.

"I've had to," she replies. "I'll take the potion out tomorrow morning and be rid of it." She's not sure why she tells him that. It isn't as if it matters. And she's not sure either of why she turns and says, "I didn't want to do it, and I don't trust it, and it was probably dangerous, but it might have helped him. And that would have been enough."

"Of course it would," Eric says, frowning a little at her. She wonders what he's thinking, and what he thinks of the boy who couldn't live with what he'd seen or done or both.

"But it's too late," she says, "so it doesn't matter." Then she goes back to the cottage.

Eric follows a little slower.

That night Sarah sits up with a candle because she can't sleep, even if it is a waste of light. She toys with mending a bit of one of the blankets they don't need now but will, come winter. Bale lies on the floor beside her, whining ever so often and licking Sarah's bare foot.

She doesn't notice Eric's sitting awake as well until he says, "D'you believe in Heaven and Hell, Sarah?"

It might be the first time he's used her name, except for the warnings in the forest. The first time just talking, surely. He doesn't call to people often, she realizes. He waits for them to come close, or to look at him, and then he speaks.

Sarah stops pretending to mend - she's picked out the stitches twice already - and looks at her hands on the table. She remembers stories of princesses with pretty white hands, stories her mother mostly told. But they feel very long ago and far away. "I'd like to believe in Heaven," she says. "I don't want to believe in a God who'd make a Hell. Not after everything there is on earth already."

Eric laughs, brief and bitter. "There's that, I suppose. Somedays I just think the Hell's more likely."

"I try not to think about it," Sarah says. "I do what I can to make this life better, and I suppose I'll cross the other bridges when I come to them." She scratches at a spot of dirt on her fingernail. "I can't do anything about either Heaven or Hell anyway, so there's no point worrying."

"I don't think you need t'worry," Eric says, from the dark. He's quiet for a moment and he says, "You're right, you know. I have seen someone die of drink, and it isn't a pretty way to go. It's just hard to remember that when otherwise y'can't sleep for what you see and remember doing, and when those memories chase you awake, too."

"I'll make you camomile," she says and she thinks he smiles.

"It's a poor substitute, I'm afraid."

"Valerian, then," she counters and now she knows he does. She adds, "You'd be a God-sent companion if it weren't for that, I'll tell you."

He's silent and in the candle-light she can't see for sure what his face says. But there's a try for lightness when he replies, "At least when I'm not jumping at shadows that only come from my own head." Then he says, "I'll stay the winter, if you'll have me."

"That'd be a help," Sarah says.

"You should sleep," Eric tells her, and Sarah sighs agreement and blows out the candle.


	3. Summer

Of all the summers Rose has ever seen, this is the kindest.

Sarah tries to think of it that way, when her mind wants to look at the wan sun in a pallid sky flecked with clouds and compare it to memories of before, before, _before_ - before the good queen died, before the foolish king remarried, before Ravenna took the kingdom for her own. It does no good, thinking of it like that; it only makes her bitter. Better to measure it by a smaller span.

And it is a kind summer, by the measure of these years. It rains only a little more than enough and is rarely grey when it's not raining; the sun isn't hot and it doesn't bring life bursting out of the soil, but the wheat grows and the beans grow, the turnips and the cabbage and all the other things that might see them through the winter without ribs you can see clear under skin.

If they're lucky, and the tax isn't too high.

Sarah goes barefoot in the summer unless she's going into the forest. She likes to feel the earth against her skin and as she says, the floor of her house is dirt anyway: dirt polished by years of feet walking on it, meagre furniture moving on it, things being dropped on it, but dirt nonetheless.

In the summer it's easier to bathe and to wash linens and clothes. Long evenings are filled with the busywork of mending and making, sitting outside the house to use the last of the sickly sunlight until it's gone completely. Sarah washes her hair and washes Rose's, and makes May let her do the same to hers, though May pulls the comb through her own hair because she can't sit still and let Sarah do it.

She bullies both men into washing themselves, though truth told it takes more to bully Jack than Eric. She makes him get a new shirt from Ivy, who weaves well enough, since he's not spending his coin on drink so much now; she scrubs the other one till you might think once it had had a colour other than dirty grey and smells of soap and camomile and the flowers she puts in with the clothes she puts away. Cleanliness, beyond her hands and wet cloths and skin as available, is a summer-time luxury.

Some days she lets her hair down. One of those days, Eric stops as he carries a coomb-sack of the barley the miller sold Sarah in return for the fur she brought out of the forest, to wrap his baby in. And Eric looks at her and she notices, to look up and shield her eyes from the sun and say, "What then?" but it's almost laughing because it's as nice a day as one can have in this kingdom. In this world.

"With it all back in the braids and frizz," he says, "you'd never think your hair would shine." And then he seems to notice that he's said it, and moves away quick to store the grain in the chests under Sarah's bed.

She watches him go, and without thought her hand rises to touch her own hair where it falls near her neck.

The next time they go into the forest, Sarah stops Eric before they start back, pointing wordlessly to the branches he has tied together beside his pack - some of them even longer than they look, if you take into account who stands beside them. He shakes his head and mock-glares at her.

"I haven't cut anything," he says. "Just gathered. If it doesn't mind you using gathered branches t'light fires, it won't care if I take them out."

Sarah's not sure she believes that, but the forest doesn't feel angry and she's always fancied she can feel its moods; she frowns and asks, "What d'you want them for? We're not lacking for firewood at home."

"Not firewood," he says. "I'm going to make little Rose a nest of her own, at least until she grows up enough not to need to run out to the privy every other striking hour. I know she wakes you up when she does it. And her mother. Make her this, she'll only need to crawl in with you on the coldest nights."

Sarah tilts her head at him, surprised and for more than one reason. But the only one she voices is, "I didn't know you put your hand to carpentry."

He shrugs. "Y'pick things up." He picks up the tied bundle. "It'll take a trip or two," he admits. "I've half a mind to buy some timber off that useless miller and put it to some use, put another room on that cottage. It's small even for four, with the girl growing. And it'd give May somewhere to hide when she feels the need that isn't the bloody cow-shed."

"That's a kind thought," Sarah remarks, almost cautiously, as they start back out of the forest and towards the village. And the forest still doesn't feel angry, even when they begin to pass its borders, so she relaxes.

Eric makes a noise meant to deflect the praise, she thinks. "When she comes out of the shed she smells a bit more like cow than I find pleasant to share a sleeping space with," he says. Sarah smiles at him and shakes her head.

Rose is delighted with the bed, when Eric finishes it: it has her own mattress of straw, and Sarah trades some old sheets for a sleeping potion from the tavern-keeper and cuts and mends them down to something that could cover the bed, and there's a blanket to make it a cosy nest. Rose is a little child, in any case - Sarah does as well as she can, but there's no arguing that Rose gets less feed sometimes than a growing girl might need. But she doesn't starve, and there are children who have less.

It's the first time, Sarah thinks later, that Rose has ever had something of her own, made or bought for her to use first. Something new, even if it is mostly just a framework of stripped branches lashed and pegged together till they hold fast with a pallet of straw. And Eric's right: it does mean less waking for others, as the little girl runs out to the little hut or - sometimes more likely - the grass between here and there.

At least for May. Sarah doesn't tell Eric that she wakes each time anyway, because she hears Grip get up and go with the child, coming back and settling down at his place in front of the door only when everyone's inside it again.

When Eric presents it, no sheets yet but pallet in place, Rose claps her hands in delight and then throws her arms around his neck to kiss his cheek. Then she runs out to find Jack and pull him back to show him, and Jack exclaims in wonder that's only partly feigned for his niece's satisfaction. Before he goes back out to his work, he catches Eric's shoulder and nods to him, the best and closest to thanks that Jack can make these days.

Sarah smiles and helps Rose to make it up.

Sarah's never asked how much coin is in the purse Eric carries. Jack might know. Jack likes to know everything he can, even if he never means to make use of it. But Sarah doesn't ask him, either, because it's none of her affair. It might even have been enough for Eric to live on, but she knows the hunger the men come back with, from the wars. Sometimes they can't ever feed it and that's why sometimes they end up dredged out of ponds like Isabel's boy, or hanging in the woods off a tree, or just dead in some stupid drunken fight. Some of them don't even know what it is.

It's nothing so trite as home, though many of those in the village who see it enough to grope at it might call it that. But men and women, Sarah knows, don't do well just living. The hunger is for a reason to keep on with it, with the work of life. Even if the reason is just in something as small and tightly bound as May living for her brother and Jack for his sister, which Sarah's known for years. She's always hated to think what will happen to one if something happens to the other.

People need other people to live, to really live. It's just, she thinks, that people spend so much time hurting one another, too.

#

Bale whelps near the end of the summer, and the sale of the pups once they're weaned is a boon to the farm as well. Most go to families in the village and one stays with the farm, but one goes to a stranger who says he comes from the next village over, towards the royal castle.

Sarah has suspicions of him, and many. She can see the surprise on his face when he wanders back with her where she met him on the path, to see not just Jack's stocky form but Eric's height, too, working away at filling in the privy and moving it to a new-dug hole. Eric works without a shirt on in the heat and Sarah keeps her eyes averted, but she sees the stranger doesn't and that his mouth goes a touch sour at the sight of a man that tall and well-muscled, with those kinds of scars on his hide.

The stranger is polite and doesn't haggle as much as Sarah might expect. He's sweet enough in temper to the pup he takes with him, so in the end she decides to let him go, but the invitation to eat with them he'd made noises at accepting while they walked together is turned down now, with a mumble about needing to find his way home.

Sarah sees him off with the same courtesy she'd show anyone, but she notes that Eric - somewhat cleaner now, and dressed - meets the stranger just beyond the gate and speaks to him in a low voice for a moment, and the stranger has a quicker pace when Eric leaves him.

Neither Eric nor Sarah speaks of this as they eat that night. The stranger paid in coin, which Sarah hides away in the box that lives in the hole dug under the bed. May knows where it is, and Jack, and she feels no need to hide it from Eric anymore.

Harvest comes with threatening clouds and a smell of rain that makes Sarah's gut twist. It's only herself and her own she'll have to rely on, she knows: others will be busy with their work, especially this year, especially with this threat. There was a time once that it might mean everyone forgot differences and bargains and debts and hauled together to get everyone's grain in betime, but not now. There's not that much trust or goodwill among people now.

It doesn't really matter. She, Jack and May have done the work before, and that was with Rose no help and no extra hands. This year Rose runs back and forth with water and other needful things. After she teaches him how to use it, Sarah gives the scythe to Eric and joins May in tying the bundles into sheaves and stacking them.

"It doesn't often snow in the winter, here," she tells Eric, watching the clouds as they creep forward on the third day, when all is nearly done. "It just rains and rains and rains."

He finishes the cup of water from the bucket Rose brought, tepid and a little dusty but welcome for all that and frowns at the stocked grain. "Next spring," he says, "I'm building another damn shed s'y'can store things better, have better space for threshing and not worrying s'much about the damn rain."

"We had one," Sarah says. "We had to use the wood one winter for warmth and haven't really needed it since." At least, she adds silently, not so much to scrape from other parts of life to afford it.

"Well, no, y'might not die without it," Eric retorts, telling her he heard the silent words well enough, "but it'd make things a lot easier."

Sarah spares him a smile before taking another drink and pushing him back to work. She doesn't point out he's assuming he'll be here to stay even next spring.

They make the harvest, though only just. Threshing is dull work, as always, but Sarah chivies Jack into playing games with her or with Rose, or tells stories she remembers or has heard lately. Eric offers one or two. The first autumn rain turns the land outside to muck, like it can't contain its hatred, like it's warning them about what's to come.

On the second day of it, Eric pulls the things he's bought from different hiding places and gives them out, and no one more startled than Sarah at what he's got. He shrugs away their surprise. "Where I grew up it's custom to give gifts at harvest," he says, brusque and short. "I've not had opportunity to observe it for a while."

For Jack there are cunning knit gloves with the fingers left free for fiddly work and warm thick socks to fill out the space of his too large boots better than rags.

For Rose there's a wooden doll's head, with eyes and lips painted in bright colours and yarn for her hair instead of straw. He shows her how to tie the straw body around the peg the head sits on and Sarah thinks her eyes might pop out of her head in delight.

He gives Sarah a bundle to give to May; it's a cloak made of thick wool, thick enough that Sarah doesn't think the rain would go through it. May clutches it to her chest and stares. She looks at Eric full in the face for the first time that Sarah's seen, to nod the thanks she still can't bring herself to speak aloud.

What he gives Sarah is two-fold: first are the half-boots sewn out of the rabbit-furs they brought back, with the fur turned inward to keep her feet warm, a gift that leaves her speechless; the other is a handful of ribbons in all different colours that she takes and stares at, hands resting open in her lap.

"Y'never get yourself anything pretty," Eric says, with brusqueness that Sarah thinks couldn't be more a show if he tried. "So obviously someone else has to."

"In your hair, Sarah!" Rose exclaims, grabbing one of the blue ones and holding it against Sarah's braid. "In your hair!"

Sarah smiles at her. When she turns back to Eric, Jack's clasped his arm as his own way of thanking, but Eric shrugs.

"Damn foolish t'keep coin around tempting thieves when it could be put to use," he says, waving it away. "And since some people think I shouldn't be spending it on softening my head with strong ale - "

"I do like you much better when y'don't," Sarah hears herself agree, still running the ribbons through her fingers while Rose tries unsuccessfully to weave the blue one into her hair. She catches the edge of a smile that almost works itself out of Eric's control before he gives her a mocking salute.

"I haven't much other use for it."

Sarah shakes her head. "You're caught, Eric," she says. "This is generous, what you've done." She reaches down and pulls the boots onto her feet, feels the softness of the fur and the promise of warmth. "Thank you."

He settles for another salute.

The next day, with the rain stopped but the ground wet and the grain threshed into its barrels, the straw stacked for the cow, Sarah catches Eric in terse conversation with Jack about putting an extra room on the house - where it should go and how it should be managed. Jack's nodding a great deal, and the frown on his face is one of thought instead of his usual scowl while Eric sketches out shapes in the air with his hands - a nod from Jack here, a shake of his head and a correction there, a murmured word to finish it.

Sarah hides her smile and walks on, and pretends she saw nothing at all.

Rose has named her doll Jane, because she says something that has a face has to have a name. Just now, May is sitting with her daughter on the bed, teaching her how to wrap the little doll in a scrap of cloth for a blanket.

#

The extra room, when built, won't be much more than space for a bed and chests to store homely things. While he's at it, Eric says, he'll shore up the sides of the house and fixe a leak or two, some with wood and some with tar and straw.

Sarah decides they can spare the straw and weaves a few mats for right in front of the beds and buys some cast-off cloth from the miller's wife with her hoarded coins to make a blanket to cover the new bed. She spends more time on it than she often might and the edges are patterned with bits of green ribbon - green for good luck.

She wears the blue ribbon in her hair and patches over some worn spots on her dress with the softer colours. She pieces the red ribbon onto the pattern of a rose in one corner of the quilt and doesn't show anyone.

In between the rains Rose delights in running out to the fields and gathering anything left that smells sweet, be it flower or seed, and putting them in the straw that'll be the mattress for the new bed. May will brush her daughter's hair now, most days, and sometimes braid Rose's red ribbon in as well.

Sarah tries not to worry that Rose doesn't seem to be growing as she should any longer, even after a summer of food. She takes to catching the rain in buckets when she can because the girl is so thirsty so often that she's always running to the well, and the rain might as well be useful. Jane the doll is always at her side.

Neither Jack nor May are large, even though they would have been born before the good queen's death when almost everyone had enough to eat, at least in the eye of memory. Sarah tries to think it's nothing more than that, and not to worry the thinness of Rose's wrists.

The wood for the new room costs less than Sarah feared, and it takes less time. The first is perhaps because nobody tries to deal too sharply with Eric, not even the miller or his wife. Or, to be more truthful, nobody tries to cheat him as Sarah knows they try sometimes to cheat her. It doesn't work - not usually - because she doesn't need much they can provide and can take her goods elsewhere when she feels ill-used, but with Eric they don't even make the attempt.

There's something to be said, Sarah thinks wryly sometimes, for being taller and broader than any man in the village and having come through the war with only scars and none that would slow him down. She's never seen him threaten, nor heard of it from others, but in some ways he's like his axe: the threat doesn't have to be spoken, because you know it can always be presented. Nobody has to remind you that an axe can cut off the limbs of a man as easily as the limbs of a tree: anyone with eyes can see that written on the edge.

While Jack and Eric work, May and Sarah gather in the rest of what the garden's grown and plant the seeds of winter hope - if it isn't too wet, if it isn't too cold, some things might grow in the winter months. There aren't many.

"D'you visit the forest in the winter?" Eric asks in a break from his work one day.

"Only the nearest traps," Sarah says, "and hunt only what comes that far out. The brown cow gets us through the winter, mostly. Everything's less friendly in the winter, and the forest's that way too. Sleepier, but less friendly. And near nothing green grows."

Eric gives her a sideways look and says, "And what does is poison, I somehow think."

She smiles at him. "You're learning," she says and then laughs when he makes a mockery of a bow. He taps the side of his head.

"Some things do get through," he tells her.

"Only some things," she counters, and this time he laughs.

Rose helps with gathering everything she can, but most of the baskets are too heavy for her and she tires easily. She'll keep going even through the tired, but sometimes she'll just sit down and fall asleep, bent over whatever basket she's been carrying. She climbs in with May and Sarah most nights, saying she's cold, the doll Jane a hard lump under her arm. But she starts every night in her own little bed, and sits in it when there's time in the day.

There's a break in the autumn rain and grey on the afternoon Eric and Jack finish the new room and cut away the planks to open into it, almost as if the sky itself is giving them a nod of satisfaction. It means that Sarah opens up the house and sweeps out all the saw-dust and everything else, airs out all the linen and heats water over the fire to bathe - maybe the last real bath for all of them this winter, when it wouldn't pay to be wet or bare or do more than scrub with a cloth over dirty skin when you can.

She bathes Rose and turns a concerned eye over the ribs she can see; then Sarah bathes herself and leaves the tub - soon to be turned over and used as a table for the winter - for May. Eric and Jack bathe last, being the filthiest of them - but Eric first, and it's Eric who finds Sarah sitting in front of the house where the air is chill but the sun still shows, combing her fingers through her hair and wringing the last of the water out.

He sits down on the other rough stool and when there's silence for a moment Sarah smiles to herself and shakes her head.

"Eric," she asks, as she separates her hair into strands and begins to braid them together, "were you ever planning to get round to asking me to marry you?"

And there's another round of silence, and then Eric's laughing - soft, but overwhelming for all that; it takes a moment before he can manage to say, "Yes, as a matter of fact I was."

"Good," she says, pretending her heart is as still as it isn't, pretending her mind's still on the braid until he catches her hand and it isn't and won't be again for a while.

A man asked her to marry him once before, and she always remembers it; and when he asked her then she thought about sense and she thought about the help and she thought about keeping fed, keeping the farm, she thought of all kinds of things.

This time she mostly thinks that she's been waiting for this since he didn't come into her house with a head full of drink when it could only be too early to know if she could trust him - but that the building was when she knew it would come.

"Will you?" he asks and now she's not choosing to smile, it's just happening by itself.

"Yes," she says, and leans over to kiss him.

#

The wedding is the first time Sarah's so much as been near the church in years. She has no grudge, but no need either and the place of churches and churchmen is precarious in Tabor these days. As long as those at the top bow and scrape and don't interfere, the queen leaves them alone; but part of what they can't interfere with is the despoiling of churches and treatment of the priests, if the whim catches one of the queensmen with enough power behind him.

Or the right mood of the queen's.

So they're quiet now and keep their heads bowed as everyone does, and don't wave their fingers at those who don't bother to come to service. Sarah's one of those who doesn't bother. What there is between her and God, what little is left of it, she'll keep to herself.

But being married at the door is the way of the village and always has been, and of every other village hereabouts, so that's what they do. And if it's more worn and has seen harder things since the last time Sarah stood near it, well, so is she, and so is the man she'll marry and so is the whole world, in the end of it. And the priest will speak, because that's the way it is done, even though Sarah needs him to tell her what it is to be a wife or to have a husband like she needs Rose to tell her how to set a snare in the woods.

They could wait for spring, but they don't. Sarah doesn't trust life enough to wait for things anymore. It means there aren't any flowers to make into a crown, but she's not a new bride either, so it doesn't matter.

The gift of a pale blue cloth from Isabel surprises her; the older woman smiles in the wan way she does sometimes now and says, "Well, I kept it hoarded away in case - well, in case my boy found a girl who needed it. Won't happen now, and you would have helped him if you could." And she'd squeezed Sarah's arm while looking away from her face and then gone.

It's been a long time since Sarah had a new kirtle, something made for her and not handed down or altered or cast-off. It feels strange to put it on, though not as strange as the moment May silently pulls her to sit on one of the stools and binds her hair up in a braid like a crown, the blue ribbon all wound through.

Sarah doesn't know where she learned that. Somewhere, some time before the harm that brought herself and her brother to this farm, in a life Sarah knows nothing about and doesn't think she ever will, because Jack won't speak of it and May won't speak at all.

Those might not even be their names. At least, like Eric's, they might not be the names they were born with.

Not that it matters. The names are theirs now.

Sarah catches May's hands when she's finished and embraces her, kisses her on the cheek. May's face moves to show something that might be a smile on the face of someone who never does, and then she gets up and moves away.

And now the church door and the priest and the vows. The food everyone has brought to share and the drink neither she nor Eric will touch - though blessings to all others who would - her for a memory and him for every other reason. Sarah has a blue ribbon in her hair and as she stands with Eric's hands around hers, both of them scrubbed and she wearing a blue lighter than the ribbon, she thinks he looks . . . happy. And thinks she might, too.

She wonders how long it's been since the last time either of them looked that way.

It's a simple thing, to marry. The last time she said the words, she wondered as she spoke them what life would be like, whether she'd chosen right (and time would tell her that the answer was _no_) and what would come. This time, when it's her turn to speak, to say, "I marry you," she's looking at a face she thinks she knows better than she knew the other, and she doesn't wonder or doubt at all.

What comes will be life. And it will be easier, she thinks, with this man to help her.

The first married kiss is not demanded, either, but it's traditional and those of the village who came out to see cheer when she and Eric do.

The village has needed an excuse for a celebration, and it's longer than one might expect for just a wedding. That only makes it easier for Eric and Sarah to slip away before it's done, leaving Jack and May and Rose behind, Jack's arm around his sister's shoulders and his eye to his niece.

Grip, Bale and little Leaf meet them at the gate, but shoo away easy enough when Sarah waves at them and tells them to go lie down.

She stops inside and reaches out to take Eric's hand, and asks, "How d'you like your farm now?" smiling at him to show that she's teasing. He catches up her other hand and kisses them both.

"It's still yours," he says. "There's just one more thing that is, now, as well."

She has to stand on tiptoe to kiss him, but she does it and the kiss goes on for a while; when they stop she looks up at him and says, "Thank you."

He looks startled and asks, "For what?"

"For coming," she says. "For staying. For wanting to stay. For everything. There's any amount of other places your feet and your pay could have taken you, and this farm with little enough to offer."

"That's not true," he says, and kisses her again, and then behaves exactly like a fool in a young man's marriage by picking her up and carrying her inside. Sarah can't help laughing at him when he hits his head because he's paying more attention to putting her down on the new bed than where his own body's going, but he seems to forgive her easily enough.

It's late and dark and the other three have long ago come back, with now Jack and May to share the other bed and Rose to sleep in her little one and crawl in with - well, who knew? if she got cold. Sarah drifts on the edge of sleep when Eric brushes a bit of her hair away from her face and over her shoulder. "It's me should be thanking you, Sarah," he says, and still manages to make her name feel like a secret kept.

She knows what he thinks is the reason, and it's likely no use to explain that there was less muck on his soul and spirit than he thought there was, and so less need for anyone to clear it away. So instead she turns her head back and says, "Marriage means sharing, so we can share the thanks, too."

Sarah can hear the smile when he says, "Well enough, then," and takes it with her to sleep.

#

It takes Sarah some weeks to realize that the name of the feeling that settles in her gut is _safety_, and that perhaps she didn't feel it as much as she'd thought before.

There's love, of course, but love is easy. It's always been easy for her. It's easy to love people for all the good things in them, and love makes it easier to forgive the things that grate or anger - or if not forgive, to put them behind you as much as you can. She loves May and Jack like the sister and brother she barely remembers, dead so many years ago from fever in the night. She loves little Rose like her own daughter. She even loved her first husband as well as she could, for all that he made that hard.

Love is wonderful, but love is familiar. If it grows deeper so much the better, so much more joy. But it is an old friend and companion, a crutch she has leant on for so many years now she can't count them except as her life, or near enough to.

Safety is something else.

She recognizes it one night when she's put away her mending, leaning on Eric's shoulder under blankets while they stare at the fire, drowsing, too early to go to bed but too dim in light to do anything that needs much care. She forgives herself for not recognizing it sooner; she thinks she hasn't had it since her father died, so long ago.

Her father would not have liked Eric, she thinks. The father in her memory is gentle and pious and disdainful of soldiers, of war. She doesn't think the father of her memory could see the Eric she does, underneath what he chooses to show. And the feeling of safety in her memory is that of a child's, never tested, built entirely on the strength of mother and father against imaginary demons and monsters out of dreams.

The one she has now is at least in part because there are no three men together, in this village, who could hope to do her husband a meaningful injury. True enough that the world held far more dangerous things than three men of this village: still, the comfort is real.

And if love is familiar, it's always been webbed about with worry and with the fear of knowing that she is only herself, with only Jack to help her against anything that might attack and the hope of the village's help. This love, laced through with a kind of relief, is new.

It lasts even through the kind of everyday fury that burns like tinder.

Once, before the old queen died, there had been travelling players who came to the village and Sarah had watched them with their funny stories and caricatures of every life. She vaguely remembers the puppet figure of a stern and angry wife, and thinks she might look just like it.

But she can't help it. Her arms are folded and she's furious and to their credit both men look ashamed to warrant it.

"In my defense," Eric says, unsteadily standing in the doorway and looking like a chastised boy, "it wasn't my idea."

"It was mine," Jack says. "I thought since we got Old Man Sim's cow out of the bog, we deserved some ale." He looks the worse of the two, and Sarah's not surprised; he's also said more now than he'll often say in a whole day.

And some ale turns into too much, Sarah knows, knows too well and she's still glaring at her husband, lips pressed together, because she knows he knows as well as she does. When he stops being able to meet her eyes and stares at the floor, she jerks her head to raise her chin.

"Well," she says. "The girls and I are going to bed - in fact, the girls are already asleep and all tucked in. The two of you can stay outside till you're damn sure about whether or not you're going to be sick, because I swear by God that if you're sick in my house for ale I'll make you both sleep in the cow-shed. I'll wake you in the morning."

And in that morning much of the daily chores are done already when Sarah wakes, if done clumsily by fingers the worse for the morning after drink. And she forgives them both. And if it's not the last time Eric stumbles, they're only one time alone and never so much as two days together, and no man is perfect.

She worries, sometimes, that it's clear by now she's no more likely to bear a child than Jack is. She can't not. There's a reminder, small and dear and growing every day - if not as much as Sarah would like - that once it mattered very much, and that it wasn't only Sarah who reaped the harvest.

When she worries it helps to watch him with Rose, though perhaps it shouldn't. But he seems happy with her, happy to teach her even things he's taught her before - how to call Leaf and how to chide her, or how to whistle with a blade of grass, or how to tie good knots in rope. She's young; she doesn't always remember. But he'll teach her it again, fully willing, and when Sarah looks at him she doesn't see any yearning unfulfilled.

Just happiness to be here, and now.

Winter tries tempers. It always does.

One thing is true: the new room does give May a place to hide in the day, when she needs it, that isn't as far outside as the cowshed, nor as likely to track mud and cow-smell back in the house. Sarah thinks perhaps May needs the refuge less often, but it's possible that's her own wishful thinking: that she wants to think that however slowly, however long a time it takes, that the other woman is healing even a little.

But she still hides when too many days in too small a space and nowhere to go that isn't freezing, wet, muddy or all three brings out the snappish edge and sets even Rose to peevishness. She sleeps more than Sarah thinks she ought, but waking her makes her fretful, even unhappy, and Jack snaps at Sarah more than once for it, and then Eric at Jack, and then Sarah at Eric some days for making May flee.

More than once, either man or both of them stumps off into the rain in spite of the cold and makes Sarah worry until they're back to the house - but by nightfall, when it's time to sleep, everything mends.

These are only the edges of winter, and there's nothing to do but settle them.


	4. Autumn

By spring it's clear that Rose is ill, but Sarah can't find the reason for it.

There's no fever she can feel, no congestion of the little girl's lungs, no swellings, nothing broken, no anything she can find. The child eats as much as Sarah can feed her, but can't seem to do anything but waste thinner and thinner; she drinks as much water as anyone can give her, but she's always thirsty still.

She sleeps like she can't stay awake and when she is awake doesn't seem even to have the strength to play with Jane, although she won't let anyone take the doll away. Nothing hurts, she says; she just feels "bad", and Sarah can't get more than that out of her.

By choice, she curls up in her little bed with Leaf for extra warmth, or she sits on Jack's lap or in Sarah's arms. Sarah wraps her in blankets and wraps her feet in fur.

Eric watches, frowning, and says little. Sarah thinks through every herb, dried plant, leaf or potion she knows. She tries many of them, all of them that might serve. None of them seem to do anything at all.

Some neighbours visit, as the weather clears a little. All of them have advice, and none of it helps either. Isabel, who's taken to haunting the church and sitting for hours in front of the candles inside, says that the only hope is prayer. Sarah forces a smile and nods; when Jack sees her out, he spits quietly out the door at the idea.

May just sits in silence, watching her daughter and chewing at her fingernails.

That night, after the third time Sarah gets up to check that Rose is still breathing, she can't get back to sleep when she goes back to the bed. She's been staring into the darkness for near an hour before Eric shows he's awake, turning over to wrap an arm around her waist.

"I don't know what to do," Sarah whispers, and she doesn't. It isn't even like Isabel's boy, where she knew there was a chance even if it held risks, even if it might not work. "I've tried everything that I know."

"Tomorrow I'll go to the forest," Eric says, and adds, "Fresh meat can't hurt," before Sarah can protest. And it's true. She bites her lip. "You stay here with her, in case something goes wrong."

"She has sores on her feet," Sarah says. "I've been trying not to show May or Jack. I don't know why she has them - she hasn't so much as walked more than a few feet in the past handful of days."

Eric kisses her temple, and doesn't say anything else. It's probably wise. Sarah doesn't think there's anything to say.

Coaxing May to do chores takes its own strength; as Rose gets weaker, it seems like less and less of the world exists to her mother, and if not given a task May will sit on the old bed hugging her knees and staring at her daughter with wide eyes. She doesn't refuse to work, no - but it seems like she can't think further than the moment in front of her, not even to chores and tasks she's been doing for years.

Jack does his own work silent, scowling, and with a roughness unaccustomed. Sarah coaxes Rose into drinking new milk and then tries to turn her mind to everything else she has to do.

Her mind feels as unruly as May's.

She airs the beds and moves Rose in a bundle of blankets to a comfortable corner so that her little nest can air as well. She sweeps the floor and shakes out the straw mats, scrubs the table and scours pots and wooden bowls and the rough pottery bowl she's given over to Rose's use as a bedpan, because it's easier than carrying the girl to the privy each time.

She takes a rough comb to the snarls in the dogs' coats and looks over their paws. She sluices out the privy with soapy water. And when she goes to the cow-shed, May follows her and stands in door, arms wrapped around herself, biting her lip. As Sarah rakes out the soiled straw and begins to lay down fresh, she turns, sees May, and her patience breaks for just a moment.

"Don't you have something to do, girl?" she says, and even in her own head her voice sounds like her grandfather in a temper. She leans on the rake and swipes her fingers over her brow. "May," she says, beginning to think of kinder words.

"I don't want her to die," May says, and Sarah stares at her.

The voice isn't much more than a whisper, and it's rough and uneven, and Sarah's never heard her say so much as a word before. May's face is pale and there are circles under her eyes, and she says, again, "I don't want Rose to die."

Sarah doesn't know what to do. Her hand goes to her mouth and then she lets it fall and says, helplessly, "I don't want her to either, love."

"Can you make her better?" May asks, in that same whisper-rough voice, barely loud enough to hear. Sarah opens her mouth and closes it and tries to think how to answer and ignore when her throat closes and her eyes try to water.

"I don't know," she says, truth the only thing she can offer. "I don't know May - I can try, I am trying, I will try everything I can but I don't know what's making her sick, and I don't know what would make her better."

May bites her lip and says, "You . . .you go. To the forest. It's magic in there. Maybe something - ?" and she stops as Sarah looks upwards, widening and blinking her eyes against the tears, that they'll go back to where they come from rather than spilling down her face.

When she manages to speak, her voice is nearly as hoarse as May's. "It doesn't work like that, love," she says. "I don't - I just know how to go in and get out alive. I've already tried everything I know, every medicine and flower I bring back, I - " And she has to stop as May's face crumples and the girl starts to cry.

Sarah leans the rake against the shed wall and takes the girl into her arms for a moment. Then she pulls May outside and calls, "Jack! Jack, come here!"

It sets the dogs to barking; there must be something in her voice. Both grown ones come bounding over when Jack comes, eyes wide and fearful. He stops when he sees them and stares at May as Sarah leads her over to him.

"Take your sister," she says, still hoarse.

Then she leaves them and goes to the house. Rose is asleep, peacefully enough, though the bedpan's no longer empty and the water-cup is. Sarah refills the later, checks that the little girl is warm enough, settles Leaf back down over Rose's feet.

Her hands shake as she fills her littlest pot with water and brews camomile in it. When it's done she wraps herself in her cloak even though it's not that cold and sits beside the door with the mug in her hand. She doesn't move when Jack takes his sister, spent with crying, and tucks her into bed, or when he comes back out and hesitates beside her like he's got something to say but can't find the words. Eventually he leaves.

Sarah stays. Grip comes and lays himself out by her feet; later, Bale whines and comes to put her head on Sarah's lap. She drinks half the camomile. The rest gets cold in her hands.

It's not quite sunset when Eric comes into view, carrying the carcass of a young buck over his shoulders. When he sees her she thinks she sees him pale and quicken his step, but she shakes her head and sets the camomile aside. As soon as she thinks he can hear, she says, "Nothing's changed. Rose is the same."

She knows the first two words are a lie.

Rose eats half the venison Sarah lays out for her, and feeds the other bits to Leaf with her fingers.

#

In the days that follow, May doesn't go back to her silence. It startles Eric the first time he hears her speak, because in the turmoil of her mind Sarah doesn't think the warn him; something in Jack's face is caught between delight and anguish every time May opens her mouth.

Sarah knows why.

She doesn't bother May for much, either. The girl sits with her child in her lap, singing little songs and saying silly things in a voice that's still quiet and fragile, and it reminds Sarah of how young May is, and how much younger she would have been the years before when Rose was born, and -

And that's where thought stops, because it won't go further.

The little bed goes mostly unused, because May won't let go of her daughter even to sleep. Rose doesn't protest; sometimes she rouses enough to tell her mother little stories about the things that Jane does while everyone is sleeping. Jack gnaws the skin off his second knuckle watching them both, and Sarah doesn't think he sleeps much.

Eric sits up with Sarah one night, neither of them doing it for any good reason, Sarah telling herself she should snuff out the candle to save it and go to bed, and not doing so over and over again. Eric's watching her face and says, quiet, "You're afraid if Rose dies her mother will go with her."

"I don't know what I'm afraid of," she says. She wraps the blanket she's got around herself and works her toes into Grip's warm fur and says, "I think I'm angry, Eric. I don't think Rose dying is what let May speak. I think even if the girl had died three years ago she'd be silent as the grave, but now she's made her way back far enough that she can and her baby's going to die and I can't do anything about it. I'm angry and I don't even know who I'm angry with."

Eric's answer comes after a moment, and with an arm around her as he sits beside her on the bench at the table. "That anger I know," he says, and Sarah sighs and leans her head on his shoulder.

"I thought you might," she says.

On the night Rose dies, Sarah wakes to May shaking her shoulder, hard and violent and frantic, crying and saying, "Wake up, wake up, wake up you have to come, wake up, _Sarah_ - "

Sarah comes awake all at once and pushes May back with one arm, because there can't be anything else that May would call her for in the middle of the night. "Light a candle," she says, pushing past the other woman, "I need light - "

The dogs set up a howl and she snaps, "Get them outside!" and thinks she sees Eric move to obey.

Something on the floor trips her and she falls into the table, corner digging hard and painfully into her hip, but she ignores it. Rose lies on the bed, eyes closed and panting, curled around her stomach. She's shivering violently as Sarah kneels by the bed and touches her, lays a hand against her face and against her neck.

There's no fever, but Rose shakes; she doesn't seem to be awake but she throws up, even though the mess on the bed makes it clear she's already done that until there's nothing left in her stomach, some of it gritty and strange and dark.

"Rose," Sarah whispers, and then half-cries, "_Rose_," as a candle gutters into light, and another, and another, so many of them, and Sarah hates herself for the momentary thought to the cost of each of them and how little good the light will do her.

Jack holds May, arms wrapped around her and holding her still, saying something in her ear that Sarah can't hear, can only see when she looks back to them through blurred eyes. She looks at her husband and finds no help, only the closed face of someone who knows death when he sees it, and then turns back to the little body shaking and whimpering, and the mess already on Sarah's hands.

She's going to die, Sarah knows. Knows it here and now like a breaking blow with some too-heavy club to her chest, because she doesn't know, doesn't know what's happening, doesn't even know what's killing the child in front of her. But Rose is going to die, and knowing it knocks her head clear, so that she understands the only thing there is to do.

"Eric, get me water," she says quietly, "and get me a clean blanket."

She strips the soiled clothes off the girl and wipes her clean, then wraps her tight in the blanket; she makes Eric move the bench against the wall and pushes May to sit on it before putting the girl in her arms.

"Here," she says, putting a thickly folded cloth on May's shoulder and then leaning Rose's head against it. "If she throws up again tell me, and I'll give you something clean."

May's face is blotched in red even in the candle-light as she wraps her arms around the little body and stares up at Sarah with every pleading in her face. Sarah shakes her head and crouches down.

"I'm sorry, love," she says, and May starts to shake her head, face crumpling up again, "I'm so sorry but all we can do is make sure she's warm and safe and doesn't hurt too much." And she reaches up to touch May's twisted face and then stands up while May starts to cry and rock the girl in her arms back and forth.

Sarah pretends she isn't crying, and can't hear the coughing hacking sobs behind her, because there's no use in it yet and there are things still to do. "Help me," she says, and her voice chokes off so she clears her throat and says it louder, looking at Eric and ignoring the wet that she blinks out of her vision, "Help me, there's a mess that needs cleaning."

She strips the sheets and blankets off the bed, and Eric helps her strip the canvas cover off the straw. He takes the soiled straw outside and Sarah puts more water from the butt outside into one of the bigger pots and builds up the fire. She folds the soiled linens and puts them aside, throws out the soiled mat and blocks Leaf from trying to come back in the house.

Tries not to hear May as she cries and cries and rocks her dying girl, and tries not to see Jack as he stands staring like something carved out of dull wood, eyes glistening and mouth half-open in sound arrested, hands clenching and unclenching because there's nothing to do and nothing to fight.

When the water starts to boil Sarah pulls out a tub and puts the canvas in, wets soap and scrubs it over the dark stain until it's covered with white and then makes Eric pick up the pot and pour the boiling water over. She leaves it to soak and sets more water to heat.

Outside, the dogs whine and sometimes howl.

Come dawn, the cow kicks up a fuss and Eric goes to milk her. The soiled bed-things are all scrubbed and hung about the place to dry, the canvas spread out over the remains of the straw in the bed. It'll be a mess to tidy later, but it's spitting rain outside and there's nowhere else.

May's long ago stopped crying, but never rocking the bundle in her arms. Until the moment she does, and moves the blanket back from Rose's hair. Then she gets up and carries her burden over to Sarah and holds it out to her where she sits.

"She's not breathing," May whispers, letting her go. "And I can't feel her heart."

Sarah can't see, as the light of morning replaces the light of candles as Eric opens the shutters and lets it in. But her voice is steady enough when she says, "Jack, go and find the priest. She'll be buried in sacred ground."

Things take time, digging not the least of them. It's well-near evening by the time they lay the little girl down for her last sleep.

The blanket does as a shroud, as they haven't much else. May takes the little wood-and-straw figure of Jane out of her daughter's arms and kisses her eyes and then starts to cry again, sitting down by the grave while they fill it in because she can't stand. The priest says some words, but few, and Sarah doesn't remember them. She doesn't remember much except what her eyes see, as dirt falls on cloth and then obscures it - not the touch of air or rain, or the sense of cold or warm, or even Eric's arm about her shoulders as he guides her home.

She sits on the bench, still against the wall, and sees the straw and scattered cloth and doesn't think much on it until Eric pushes a warm mug into her hands. Then she looks down at it, knows that their little joyful girl is dead, and starts to cry.

It hurts her chest and her throat and her head, like trying to cough up something dark and ragged that's lodged inside her and won't go. More than once the choking sobs make her retch, though there's nothing in her to come up. And she can't see the child inside her head or feel her against her body or even remember her voice, not now, but she doesn't have to because there's something else that's gone and won't come back, can't come back, will never come back.

She cries like she's dying.

You can't do that for very long, and after a while grief staggers and stumbles to a pause, even if it doesn't stop. She knows Eric's arms are around her and her head is on his shoulder, that his shirt is wet with her tears and that her throat feels like raw meat and her eyes like they've been scrubbed with sand.

"May wanted to stay at the church for the night," Eric says, and his voice is rough and soft. "I couldn't see any harm in it. Her brother stayed with her."

"I want to sleep," says Sarah, and if it's a lie, when she's led to blankets and sheets and rest, she sleeps anyway, for a while.

#

May comes back in the morning carrying Jane, her brother in tow. Without saying anything she washes the doll in the water that's left and sets it by the window to dry. Then she turns to the dry and drying bedclothes and makes her brother help her refill the canvas bag, makes up the bed again and empties out the tub.

Or so Eric tells Sarah, when she wakes sometime near noon. Truly wakes, instead of half-waking to the ache and then twisting back into dark and dream as fast as she can. By noon she can't anymore and so she wakes up and finds May making porridge.

She sits at the table and May scoops her out a bowl, pouring around it the cream that had been going to Rose, trying in vain to make her less thin, less frail. Sarah takes up her spoon and stares at the food for a while before making herself take small bites and swallow them down.

May sits beside her on the bench and stares past the walls for a time before she says, "She could have grown up here." And in its own way, it's a question. "She could have been happy. I didn't - " she stops and then says, "Life wasn't ruined for her." She turns to look at Sarah, who puts down her spoon.

"No," she says, reaching over to lay her hand over May's folded ones.

"I didn't - " May starts again, and then, "I - " and then she stops and wipes at her eyes. When she speaks again it's in the false-brisk tone that somehow everyone knows, at times like these. "Eric took m'brother out to look at the fields. T'think about planting, he says. He says it's better to find work than sit."

Sarah looks around the house, all put back in order and breathes deeply in and out. "He's right," she says.

"But I can't think of anymore work to do," May says, voice shaking a little. She looks down at her hands and spreads them out and says, "I'm going t'keep the doll."

Sarah nods. May picks at the dirt under a fingernail. "I don't know why she died," she says. "It's not fair. Why my Rose? She could have been happy."

Sarah shakes her head. "I don't know," is all that she has to say.

May looks up, all the way to the roof and the sky beyond, maybe. "Father Watt says the good go to Heaven. D'you think she's in Heaven, Sarah?" As if what Sarah thought means more than the priest could.

Sarah remembers talking with her husband before he was, in a forest she hasn't seen in months. She says, "I think if anyone's in anything like Heaven, Rose must be," because it's the best she can do for truth and she can't stomach a lie right now.

"Maybe she'll be happy there, then," May says, and then looks back down at her hands while tears fall on them again.

Sarah gets up and goes to the door, lets the banished dogs back in. They nose around her hands and whine and lick her fingers; Leaf goes to the empty branch-bed and sniffs at it, and then sits beside it with a whine.

Jane sleeps in the branch-bed, and May chases the dogs out of it - but Leaf sleeps beside it and never anywhere else.

The wheat goes in and the garden's planted. People come by with gifts, now and again, the way they used to come by with advice, until someone else dies and the tragedy is supplanted. May cries often, but she doesn't stop speaking, so in the end Sarah supposes that's well enough.

Sometimes people who are ill ask Sarah for help, and she makes them something for it, and most times it works. And she never knows why it doesn't. And for weeks and weeks after they put their little girl in the ground she feels like her soul is wrapped in smothering wool. She can't stand it, but she can't cut through it either. She knows Eric watches her with worry in his face, but even knowing that doesn't seem to make a difference.

She plants and cleans and cooks and sews and eats and drinks and it's all so far away.

And the day before midsummer she says, "I want to go to the forest."

The forest is the same.

Some people say it never changes, but Sarah doesn't believe it. In the end she believes her grandfather's stories, that it once lived and thrived and if it was dangerous, it was only dangerous in the way of wild beasts, not in the way of rotten magic. She believes that one day it began to change and after it had changed Ravenna came and killed the king and took the kingdom and tried to burn it, but that it ate up her messengers.

These things might not be true, but she believes them anyway.

The trees are black claws against the sky, with leaves ragged and cramped and far between. What plants grow here are hidden or look half-rotted to hide themselves, and there's no predator larger than a weasel, because the forest itself eats the deer. This is where the forest finds your terror and uses it to drive you mad. Where the trees themselves watch you and decide whether or not you're an enemy.

Eric doesn't think it's a good idea that she's here. He hasn't said anything, not since she decided to come, but she can read the line of his shoulders, the quiet of his face, the rhythm of his walk. But she doesn't say anything until night's fallen and their little fire reaches defiant fingers at the night.

Tonight, like some other nights she's seen before, it feels almost like the trees are glad of the fire and lean over to warm their branches.

"I don't think I'll find her here," she says, aloud. This time they brought Bane with them, leaving Leaf and Grip for May and her brother, and in the warmth of the fire Bane lays her head on Sarah's foot.

Eric looks at her sharply, and Sarah smiles, shaking her head. "Rose," she says. "I'm not looking for her here. I know that's why you thought I wanted to come." She looks up past the branches and the fire, at the stars beyond it, and says, "I just needed to come here. To remember who I am." She looks at her husband and this smile is sadder, or wryer, or more something. "To remember that if this forest can exist in the world, I can't expect to understand all of it, or be able to do anything against it." She shrugs. "I think sometimes I forget."

Eric's eyes search her face, she thinks; in the end, he says, "Y'do enough."

She leans over and kisses him.

May does stop crying, but she doesn't stop talking. In the end, Sarah can be content with that.


	5. Frost

Three harvests and three litters; three years of the forest; and now the door is straight and the gate in repair, and there's enough hoarded coins that when she can May buys little pots of bright paint from the travelling men and the walls inside now bear bright little pictures of the sun, or birds, or flowers round the door. She can't make them grow, she says, but she can paint them there.

Sarah smiles at her and nods. There's no reason for her not to do it, after all, and it seems to make her happy - though with May it can be hard to tell. She speaks often and well enough these days, and sometimes she even smiles or laughs, but there's still always a wistfulness about her and most days if there's no work for her to do she'll sit in one of the new woven willow chairs and stare at the world with distant eyes.

Sometimes Sarah wonders what she sees.

Jack smiles more, too, and talks more often; he puts more thought into what he does and makes, and Sarah's grateful for that. They've been her family for so many years, never mind blood and where it is and isn't, and it warms her to see them unfurl from the tight, unhappy things she's always known, even if slowly, even if only a little. Even if it comes at the cost it did. There are worse things than for a loss to draw people closer, to let them look up and around. Anyone who lives these days knows that.

And there's Eric. Who walks with her in the forest and scowls at the tax-man when he comes (and is more polite these days than was his wont before), who watches her when he thinks she can't see with delight in his eyes that warms her more than anything, who she watches when she can because it gives her joy. A careful joy, maybe, but joy even so.

Sarah sees all these things and tries to hang on to them, to hold them close.

She doesn't know if she used to be better at hiding what goes on behind the face she wants to show, or if it's only that Eric knows her so well now that he can see through any mask she chooses. She only knows that on their first walk in the Dark Forest this spring, when the cold and dark have pulled back enough that Sarah thinks it wise, Eric looks sidelong at her and breaks their companionable silence by asking - or rather saying, "You're worried about something."

With Jack or May she might wave it away, say something about knowing better than to borrow trouble. With her husband she meets his gaze, looks away and points to the trees.

"Every year there are fewer and fewer leaves. I know you can see that, too."

He stands up from where he's been setting a snare and comes to stand beside her, the solidity of him comforting even against the worried edge of these thoughts. She can't decide if she's reassured or even more deeply worried when he says, "The bigger game is further and further in, too," by way of agreement.

She sighs. "Life has patterns. You know that as well as I. It may mean nothing at all, and yet - the Forest is older than us. And sometimes I think it knows more. And every year, it feels colder. Every year," she adds, and the thought as it comes disturbs her deeply, "the branches look more and more like claws."

Eric doesn't answer her but with a hand on her shoulder. After a moment she sighs and says what she's been trying not to think; says, "I think this kingdom is dying, Eric. I think the land is. I think that maybe anything we do is just . . ." She lifts one hand and then lets it fall. "And I shouldn't think that after three good years," she adds, wry. "It's ungrateful at the least."

The arm around her shoulder tightens and Eric kisses the top of her head. After a moment he says, "There are other kingdoms, Sarah. Other lands. When it comes to it, if we have to, we'll go find one of them."

She blinks, because it's not a thought she's ever had before, and it slips into her mind like fresh air through smoke. She looks up at her husband and says, "You think we can?"

He shrugs, with the smile she knows, the one that knows itself that what he says sounds simple and may be madness, and he says, "We hunt in the Dark Forest. I think we can probably do anything."

Sarah lets that be a comforting thought.

There are rumours about girls going missing; about queensmen coming to villages and instead of looking for boys to draft to the wars, they take the girls for who knows what, and it's not like so often happens with soldiers and pretty girls - never one unlucky girl, and they never come wandering back, closed-faced and tired with a baby in tow, or with bruises and who knows what else, some pretending they were never taken away and that everything's the same as it was when they were children.

The queensmen who take them don't leer or paw at them, or even look at them much - just load them into carts and take them away.

Any time May hears mention of it, she goes quiet again with her face closed and pale; then she'll not be found more than a few yards from her brother and stays nervous as a cat surrounded by hounds. But after a few days the rumours go quiet again for a while, and May unwinds and the world moves on.

Grip sleeps these days more than anything else; he's getting old and sore and likes best to sit with May when May does something quiet. But Bale and Leaf are still hale enough, and nobody comes around the farm at night unheralded. Or during the day, for that matter.

And the corn grows, and this year's calf grows towards selling weight - they'd had enough to pay for stud this year outright, and not promise the calf - and Sarah tries to shake the feeling of an axe hanging over all their heads. After all, the only axes on this farm, she thinks to herself, are the one for cutting wood and the one at Eric's belt.

#

The morning that Rolph comes pelting down the lane, setting Leaf and Bale to howling, Eric left that morning for the forest, kissing Sarah and leaving her behind.

It doesn't happen often, that. Even after three years and being fair certain she's taught him all she ever knew about the place, there's a little gnawing fear, a little apprehension; there are still days when it seems the forest speaks to her, that she can feel what it wants her to feel, understand a message it wants to convey, and she's by no means sure Eric can. It makes her anxious when he goes alone.

But it's a fine day and he's no fool and the ache in her gut makes the idea of standing, let alone walking, make her wince. Even sitting at the table so that she can mend and plan, as she makes herself do, makes her feel like the fist in her guts is yanking harder just to teach her a lesson.

May wordlessly brews willow bark and adds lashings of the honey Eric bought as a treat; Sarah would protest, but it's probably pointless, and besides, it does make the bitter stuff less wont to make her gag.

It's never seemed fair to her, that she's denied children and yet still visited by this and all the discomfort and inconvenience that comes with it. It still doesn't, but she bites her tongue on complaining. May's something like bright today, and a mention of anything to do with babes and children might tarnish that, and that wouldn't serve anyone's temper.

Then the dogs howl to wake the dead, and Sarah's on her feet and at the door with no mind for any kind of pain, her hand going to the haft of the wood-axe that stays by the door.

In three years Rolph's grown taller and broader, but he's still the runabout for most of the village. But Sarah's never seen him so pale, fending off Leaf and Bale who jump at his arms. They know him, so they don't bite; but he's startled them, so they leap and bark and Sarah has to call them three times to heel before they come.

May comes and catches Leaf by the ruff, makes her calm. But Sarah's eyes are for Rolph's face and his freckles are like the spatters of ash on a white sheet. "Missus Sarah," he says, panting, as she opens her mouth to ask what he's doing, what's so wrong. "Missus Sarah, there's queensmen in the village and they're looking for y'husband, like." He gulps air as she gapes at him and then says, "And their leader's some big milord, even his men are nervy of him. He's pale and tall and he's got a scar on 'is face here," he points to his forehead and then he stops and Sarah turns at the pained noise May makes.

Her hands are at her mouth and she's whiter than Rolph. Sarah's mind, or part of it, the part not curling in on itself in fear and wanting to cry, or run, or both - that part of it makes the guess that's there to make and turns her back to Rolph.

"They're taking the girls," she says and Rolph nods.

"Th'older ones - you know there aren't many girls stayed around here if they could leave, and everyone else's trying to hide but I don't know it'll work, but the big milord is asking about the man who hunts in the Dark Forest and that's got to be your husband, Mistress Sarah, and there's a dozen of'em at least, an' old Cal's stalling them as much as he can at the tavern and they're drinking fair enough, but - "

There are the thoughts you have and the things you know, when the edges give out. At the bedside of a dying child, at the end of the world. And Sarah has them now and is already shouting, "_Jack!_" as loud as she can; May's still standing where she was, frozen and shaking and Sarah shakes her. "May! Move, girl - get cheese and the bread from the house and your cloak and mine and my shoes and your brother's coat. _Now!_" and she shakes her again and pushes her towards the house.

She shouts "_Jack!_" again, loud enough to make her voice crack and spares a glance for the lane; no one there yet, no sound of hooves.

"You," she says to Rolph, and hesitates as he stares at her and then decides to trust what she's sure she knows. "You take this," and she reaches back for the axe and pushes it at him, "you take this and you go and you get Will and Tall John, you hear and you get their axes. When the milord comes up here he'll bring at least half his men, probably more - they'll be looking for Eric and God knows old Cal'll be on about how strong he is and what he did last year when he hauled that fallen roof off Ivy's old man. You go and you get the other boys and when there's only a few of them left you damn well take your axes and you get those girls out, you hear me? Get them out and _run_. Don't stop, _just run_; go for the hills, any forests you think you can cross, take them across the river. Better risk that they starve than whatever's wanted of them at the castle. You hear me?" and when Rolph nods shakily, hands gripping the axe tight, she shoves him and says, "Then _go_."

And now Jack's here, and May comes out of the house with what she was sent for and pushes them at Sarah, but Sarah shakes her head. "Not for me, girl, you - put on the shoes, put on the cloak. Jack - " and she turns to him, pushes her cloak and his coat into his arms and says, "there's queensmen coming and you've got to get her safe - you've never gone but I know you've listened to every word I've ever said about the Dark Forest and it's your best hope, take May, take the dogs and run, don't stop running till you're under the eaves, d'you hear me?"

Jack stares at her and shakes his head. "No," he says, "no, I'll stay here and meet them, you take her - "

"Don't be stupid," Sarah says, harsh. "They're looking for Eric, and they know he's got a wife. They'll know fast enough you're not him, they'll cut you down and they'll come after us and they've got _horses_, Jack. They find me here, they might stop to talk long enough to give you a chance to get there."

May's crying, but she's pulling on the shoes and putting on the cloak. Jack's jaw works and he stares at Sarah. "Yeah," he says, "and they might stop to do other - "

Sarah hits him as hard as she can across the face. "You take your sister and you go!" she shouts at him. "This is my farm and my say - you take her and you _go_ damn you, you get her out of here, or you're no kind of brother to her at all. Hear?"

His hand is to his face and his eyes shine, but he nods. "Call the dogs and take them," Sarah says, "and go. And if you - " she stops and takes a deep breath. "You won't find Eric, he'll be too deep in and there's so many paths . . . " She clenches her teeth and doesn't let a breath become a sob, and then says, "If you see my husband you tell him don't come, hear me? He'll only be another dead body here. You tell him stay away and find somewhere else. _You tell him that._"

Then she pushes at both of them. "Go!" she says, and they start, slow but then running; Jack calls the dogs, and if Bale looks at Sarah once Sarah shoos her with hands and voice, sending her running off at Jack's heels.

And still there's no one at the lane.

The pain in her gut comes back then. It's a distant thing, as distant as the lowing of the cow and calf in their distress over all the noise the dogs had made, and the single crow the cockerel gives. Unthinking, Sarah's hand goes to her belly as she stares past the gate.

_Tell him to stay away._

Her gut's a distant thing but the sudden close of her throat is like a knife and it makes her head spin. She takes her steps to the house as a stumble and catches herself on the door.

She might have gotten Rolph killed, she thinks, and more than him; she's known the boy since before he could walk and he's as like to do as she says as anything else. But maybe not; and maybe one, or two, or more - maybe some of the girls will get away and the others in the village will have the sense to run.

Sarah thinks of May's white face at hearing the leader described; she thinks of something so bad it shocks a young girl silent and full of terror, that turns a young man into the dour creature Jack had been, neither of them willing to even hear their old life mentioned. Someone who would do something that bad, or even command it to be done - no, Sarah thinks. If even a handful of her neighbours and their daughters got away this day, it would be more than might otherwise be.

She's not sure how long she stands there, staring at nothing, before she hears the first whinny of a horse behind her along the lane. Not more than a handful of moments, certain, but every moment more is a moment of Jack and May further gone. She pushes herself to stand straight and pushes stray wisps of her hair back out of her eyes, flicks her braid over her shoulder. She takes her mending off the table and goes to sit on the bench outside the door, and thinks of sitting so much like this, four springs past.

_Keep him away, keep him away._ As the horses come closer her hand slips and she stabs her needle into her finger, drawing blood; she looks at it and then says a prayer that, over the blood, might be magic instead - though she's never done magic, and doesn't really believe in it.

_Please,_ she says to God and to the world and maybe, maybe to the Forest, over her blood, _keep him away._ There are seven men riding up the lane, and trampling the growing things beside it; she prays, _Please keep him away._

The leader is almost pale enough to be the walking dead; if his face has only the one true scar, above his brow, the skin looks like it should be covering so much more, like it should show evidence of how twisted the soul is underneath. If four springs past Eric came to her door carrying the phantom stench of war and death, it's now left him; but she doesn't think this man has ever been without it, and that he would mourn if it were gone.

Every moment is a moment further for Jack and May to run. With the horsemen in sight, Sarah puts her ruined mending down, presses her thumb against the bleeding point of her finger and gets up to go to the gate.

"Hail, milord," she says, unable to stomach the word _welcome_. "What brings you to my farm?"

He looks down at her, and there's malevolence in his eyes, and amusement. And that, she thinks in a distant way, is good. Malice like that interferes, draws people aside from their task to continue a game that amuses them but does nothing to further their aims. He says, "Hospitality, goodwoman," and there are faint sniggers from the men furthest back.

Sarah sketches a curtsey. "It is the duty of every subject to offer hospitality to the queen's men," she says, her voice calm and empty. "Please, come in."

She opens the gate they could easily have ridden down; the leader dismounts, as do four of the others, one of whom takes his leader's reins. The man has to duck to come into the house, and as she waits Sarah sees the doll Jane, still tucked up in her mistress' old bed that they've never put away. Sarah wishes she'd thought to have May take it with her.

But in the end, it's only a doll. May is gone, and Jack, and the dogs; every moment is a moment that takes them further towards a place no queensman can enter and live, and where no horse will ever go. Eric's gone and she still prays for him to keep away; and so all the living are gone, soon to be out of this man's reach.

In the end, Jane's only a doll, and memory is only memory.

"You come to a poor house, milord," she says, moving to the hearth. "I have but small beer to drink and bread to eat, though of course I can kill a chicken if milord wishes fowl."

"By all means," says the leader of the queensmen, his tone all friendly, his air all malice. And so Sarah serves the men small beer and throttles one of the chickens, plucks it and sets it on the spit to roast.

She counts the minutes by the sound of her heartbeat, watching her own shaking fingers, and then something eases and she fights the urge to laugh. Running, running, running: as any woman runs, Sarah knows, May and Jack are at the edge of the forest now, and soon they'll be beyond these men, and God grant that Eric stays away long enough, the danger will be past.

She's going to die, Sarah knows. It's like a blanket of snow in her head, sending so much of her to sleep, leaving the distant empty speaking self that had cleaned the cottage while Rose's mother rocked her dying child. Soon this man will tire of leering and watching his men leer, grow bored of thinking they are watching her desperately pray for them to leave and leave her alone, grow impatient with the game. And he'll turn to his true purpose and be angry, so, so angry at what she'll have to say.

It takes half the time it takes to roast a chicken.

"At the tavern," the leader says, "we were told there are four people on this farm. Yourself, of course, your husband," and there's significant weight on the word, as the man gets to his feet and comes to stand behind her, "and two hirelings. A brother, and a sister."

Sarah straightens from where she's been adjusting the spit and says, without turning, "Yes." She wipes her shaking hands on the front of her kirtle and says, "But I sent them away. To the Dark Forest."

There is silence. Sarah closes her eyes, and she thinks of Eric sitting on the floor a few feet from her, teaching little Rose to train a puppy to sit.

"What?" says the leader, and there is no friendliness in his voice now, now even feigned. Sarah can see one of his men by the door, and watches him straighten; she can imagine the others outside hearing the same note in their leader's voice and following suit.

"I sent them to the Dark Forest when I heard you were coming," Sarah says, proud that her voice doesn't shake, still not turning around. "My husband's already there, of course. He's the one you were looking for, I think. I don't know why. The others should be well into the trees by now." Now she does turn, and sees the fury and all that is ugly in this man boiling to the surface, hiding under his skin, her calmness - she thinks - its own cause for anger. She says, "You can follow them, if you like."

Her back hits the wall with his hand at her throat and the other pinning her wrist; her free hand scrabbles at his glove because she can't breathe. His hand only tightens as he says, "Playing games isn't a wise choice for you, woman. We came here to request your husband's services for the Crown. Now be a good girl and tell us where he is, and you might live long enough to beg my pardon."

Then he lets her go and she drops back against the wall, coughing and trying to gasp air.

He's lying. She can feel that through his skin, hear it in every word, knows it the same way she knows the Forest when she walks in it: that even if the words are true the meaning is a lie; that May would have died, and Jack protecting her, and God only knew what they wanted of Sarah's husband.

The needle-prick on her finger throbs, apart and over the burning of her throat and the ache where the wall hit her back. _Stay away,_ she says, and in her mind she wishes the paths all gone, the trees changing, the way home blocked by the forest itself, hearing her, helping her.

Knowing even if she were to live and he to go with them, what would come back would never be Eric, would be something else or would never come back at all.

She can hear it in the queensman's voice, and feel it in the air he breathes out. She looks up at him, when she can speak, and shakes her head. "I don't know where he is," she says, and then lies, "And the others will have found him by now, and told him to run from you."

His face twists; he lunges forward and his fingers close in her hair, making her cry out as he throws her away from the wall, to the floor in the middle of the cottage; then a boot catches her in the stomach and she curls around the pain, retching.

"If they know where he is, woman, then so do you," says the leader's voice, and she shakes her head, trying to find words around pain and sobs.

"Jack's a hunter," she says, lies, tries to think. "Jack can find him; I never could. I could never find him," she lies, and lies.

The man curses her and kicks her again. She gags, and her eyes tear and overflow.

"Take her outside," the leader says, and then the man who was by the door takes hold of Sarah's arms and drags her out of the door, ignoring how she tries to twist away until she manages to jerk one arm out of his; but she only falls and hits her head on the ground.

There's a second of blackness and the sound of a voice. "Hold her," it says. And then, "And when we're done here, burn it. Then we'll go back and find the one that warned her."

And Sarah sees the Forest in her head and smells the rankness of it, familiar and comforting; she sees Eric and the trees and her head is spinning like the earth is spinning when she says, like he can hear her, "Eric, stay away," before there are hands on her wrists and her ankles, and a weight on top of her, and alone and far away from those trees she starts to scream.

_In the end, the screaming - all the screaming - stops._

_And there is fire, and it burns; but then the rain comes and leaves enough smouldering wreckage that anyone can see what it is that was burned. One way, there is a village now in colours of charcoal and ash. And then follow a little lane and you find a farm._

_What was once a farm._

_The cottage is a skeleton in black, and the cowshed is worse for the patches of red and brown that say that something once lived there. Someone set fire to the fields, and most of them burned before the rain came, taking the second shed with them._

_And in the space in front of the cottage is the body of a woman in a blue kirtle. Her limbs are askew and her face is blank, dead and staring. Wounds gape at her throat and her belly, and the kirtle she wears is torn. Ravens sit on the remnants of buildings and look at her and then fly away._

_In the forest a few miles away, a huntsman fights his way through branches turned against him, and searches for paths that are lost. When he finds them again, when he wins his way through -_

_This is what he'll come home to find._

_Sometimes edges bleed._


End file.
